I finally managed to see Uzak (Distant) yesterday, on the last showing of this Turkish movie in Montreal. I spent a few days in Istanbul a couple of years ago and I couldn’t miss this chance of seeing the city again. I knew for having read reviews that I should be expecting a very slow pace of storytelling, in the Tarkovsky style, but I was just content with the idea of seeing scenes shot in Istanbul. So after looking for the cat- who had run away and was hiding in a neighbor’s yard – off I went over the Jacques-Cartier bridge, driving against traffic, creating my own little rush hour. Leaving the sunny and busy St-Laurent street to immerse myself in snowy Istanbul was quite a shock.
When I came back home, B. asked me what the movie was about and I was able to tell it to him in about 3 sentences: a disillusioned photographer in his 40’s deals with the disruptive presence in his house of a distant cousin who is looking for work in Istanbul. While he gets annoyed with his cousin, he sleeps with an unknown woman, watches tv and says goodbye to his ex-wife. All of this while making a living at taking pictures of tiles in his photo studio and walking around the city. (The official site does a better job than me, telling the story in a single sentence.)
I can only dream of trying to sell a concept like that to a producer or a distributor!
B. didn’t come to see the movie with me because it was in Turkish with French subtitles (and he’s not fluent in French) but he wouldn’t have missed much because there’s hardly any dialogue in the movie. We spend long minutes watching a guy watch tv, watching a guy watch the river, watching a guy watch people walking in the snow, etc. I did get slightly bored at one point, but it didn’t matter. It was a thing of beauty, the kind of movies whose impact you realize only later, when you’ve left the theater.
I was struck with the power of movies, specifically by the power of silence in movies. After watching the main character watch other people in silence, I started hearing his thoughts. I swear I knew what he was thinking, and I could recognize myself in those thoughts. With just the most basic information given through dialogue, viewers could understand the main character’s feelings for his ex-wife, his impatience with his guest (who overextended his welcome), his disenchantment with life, his desire to be left alone, etc.
When I was a student, my first attempts at writing screenplays were in the great tradition of French films: blah, blah, blah, blah. Lots of talk, lots of tension and feelings passing through dialogue. Then I went to an American film school which had been an important school in the 70s, during the « experimental movie » wave. The teachers had made films during that time and even though they were lecturing to a 90’s crowd of students, they still insisted on the fact that we should forget about traditional narrative and use something else than dialogue to carry meaning in our films. As a graduate project, I directed a short film without any dialogue, telling the story through images only. I figured it would make my teachers happy (it did, and off it went to the festivals circuit) and since it was neither in English nor in French, I knew it could play in the U.S. as well as in Quebec. (Even without dialogue, my film was accused by some students in my school of « having too much of a story, being too narrative ».)
This was quite a few years ago, and now that I make a living at writing (kind of), I realize that I’m back to blah, blah, blah.
I love writing dialogue. I think it’s one of my strong points. But sometimes, shutting the fuck up is what movies are all about. Except of course, when the time comes to convince a producer of the necessity of silence…
