Winter Sleep:

Solitudes and contentions

by Dilshan Boange

To the great delight of movie lovers, the Digital Film Academy at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute, held a screening of the Cannes Award winning Winter Sleep on May 28, with an additional bonus in the form of an introduction and some interesting insights into the movie as a visual narrative, by Sinhala theatre practitioner and fiction writer Piyal Kariyawasam.

Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Winter Sleep is a 2014 Turkish drama adapted from the short story, 'The Wife', by Anton Chekhov. Set in Anatolia, it presents a story that is very tightly bound to the landscape in which it is set. The movie won the Palme d'Or and the FIPRESCI Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, and was selected as the Turkish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards.

Among some of the notable points that Kariyawasam brought out for the audience, were factors like how themes and love and domestic conflicts are portrayed. Understanding the interplay of relationships between the central characters and the aspirations or lack of them is also a significant matter that helps the viewer gauge the motives behind the way in which frictions arise. Another point was the manner in which dialogue has been presented, like theatre being infused to the narrative. Kariyawasam said certain scenes seem almost as though they were more suited for stage theatre than film.

Winter Sleep gave me as a Sri Lankan a view of a landscape, a geography that was absolutely fantastic in terms of unusualness. The story is set in a rural area characterised by rock outcrops that have moulded a somewhat nature bound form of housing. Watching the film and of course the manner in which it has been filmed will impress on the viewer how much the landscape and the atmosphere affects the nature of the inhabitants. The landscape itself, I felt imposes a solitude upon the lives of the main characters and their mindsets. The atmosphere creates a quietude that grips the people and almost sentences them to an inward silence that makes them solitary creatures.

The central character is Aydin a man of many attributes. He is a retired thespian who has considerable knowledge about the Turkish theatre. He is a writer who has published several books and regularly writes to periodicals. And he is also a businessman mainly operating in the hospitality sector, his establishment being the Othello Hotel. The other characters who are within his immediate domestic setup are - his young wife Nihal, his divorcee sister Necla and his staffers who help run the establishment.

Another layer in the story is how Aydin's tenants face some severe financial debility and seek his munificence, only to see that his mettle as a landlord and businessman cannot be affected easily with appeals to 'presumed humanism'.

He is a man immersed in his world of writing, literature, and philosophical interests. One of the inner conflicts that is brought out about what Aydin's work as a writer means to the world at large is whether or not he is writing about the subjects he knows best and is instead writing about things that may seem thought provoking due to controversy being bound to the topic in the context of political realities. Another topic of introspective thought that is contentious to Aydin is whether he has wasted the best years of his life on things that didn't matter as much? The question of how much a man has achieved when looking back and how what can be the yardsticks to gauge success is a subtle yet sensible question that comes out in the film.

The issues related to conflicting emotions between Aydin and his young wife Nihal are brought out slowly and occupy the climatic points of how the story will end. Nihal is shown as a woman trapped by her circumstances of the comforts in life provided by her wealthy husband and also the geography that has placed them in a cocooned state of solitude, which deprives her of a vibrant social life. Aydin on the other hand has created a lifestyle, which he is very content with and distrusts new faces and initiatives that may create trouble in the future.

Beneath the exteriors of the characters like Aydin and Nihal, we come to learn of voices and sensibilities that have practically no means to be expressed except through conflict of words and sentiments.

We see how their intentions to do good have to be at times kept in secrecy. The film speaks of how on one hand, the need for an existential investigation of their lives is approached through their introspective conversations that arise through contentions. And on another level it seems to say that bringing out our issues may not be an answer to the problem unless we know how to deal with them, once they have been brought out.