Winter Sleep (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2014)

9.5/10
Winter Sleep is a movie about a man, Aydin, who lives in and runs a hotel in the mountains of Turkey, in addition to renting out residential properties in the region to other tenants. The movie is largely a character study of Aydin, and it is a fascinating one. At first he appears aloof at best and negligent at worst, in his dealings with his live-in sister and his much younger wife and especially his tenants. It's not so much that the movie eventually exposes giant character flaws in Aydin either - it's just that it so convincingly picks at the little flaws in his character that he is completely oblivious to and which are actively causing destruction in his relationship with both his sister and his wife. However, even Aydin's wife, despite growing to hate and fear him, must consent that he is by and large a hard-working, honest and intelligent man. Aydin's flaws are more flaws of the soul, if I can attempt to be poetic for a second, and they are unveiled slowly throughout the movie's gargantuan running time (3h19m), particularly in two or three separate and equally enthralling arguments with his wife and sister (who are, to be sure, flawed in their own ways as well, and the script doesn't let them off the hook either).
The study of Aydin reminded me a lot of writer/director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's previous movie Uzak (Distant), in that it too dealt with characters who weren't overtly flawed in the way we typically think of movie characters as flawed, but who had altogether more subtle yet no less damaging and very real flaws all the same. The characters, like Aydin, float between spinelessness and altruism, with no real awareness of the former or conviction to the latter. As an example, Aydin donates money to a charity not because he wants to but because he should - but it's not even that he doesn't want to either. Similarly, his repeated defense throughout the movie is a variation of "I'm not forcing you to stay" (to his wife) or "I didn't force you to come" (to his sister) and nothing speaks louder about the type of person Aydin is. He's right that he's not the problem on one level, but he's the entire problem on a completely different level. I can't explain it myself, so just watch the movie.
The movie's final act is interesting and ultimately depressing. We are shown that despite his conflicts with his wife and sister (not to mention his minor conflicts all around him with his tenants and other people from the area), Aydin has not learned and will never learn, getting drunk, getting self-righteous in his right-but-wrong way towards a local teacher, and throwing up on himself, in that order. At the same time his wife's attempt to make amends with a tenant that feels wronged by Aydin goes horribly wrong. The impact of this scene is a little tougher to pin down but to me it showed Aydin's wife experience something of the external factors that contributed to making Aydin into the man he has become. Aydin's wife is altogether more naive and innocent and this harsh brush with an ugly reality (and her subsequent tearful-bordering-on-traumatized reaction) suggests that not only has she now been face-to-face with the kind of thing that could give rise to apathy in a person (like her husband), but that she is aware that her own soul has been poisoned too. Which is, of course, one of the most powerful things about Winter Sleep: the recognition of ourselves in Aydin and the uneasy feeling that we are like him too, maybe in more ways than we'd want to admit.
The movie was, characteristically of Ceylan, beautifully shot in a mindblowingly gorgeous location. Most movies this long are usually filled with slow, static shots. Winter Sleep has a few, but it is an incredibly dialogue-heavy movie. Unlike, say, Albert Serra's Story of My Death (another slow director turned chatty) where the dialogue made me want to drown myself, Winter Sleep's crackles. It's absolutely rich and engrossing and makes the movie's lengthy running time feel like nothing at all. And I have to give special mention to Haluk Bilginer who played the role of Aydin, and gave an incredibly naturalistic and impressive performance. No grandstanding, no huge show of emotions, just an incredibly real performance in which a raised eyebrow or a bemused smirk still said so much.