Three Monkeys

2008 Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan

At the beginning, Three Monkeys looks more like a slow-burning thriller than anything else. Servet  is a middle-aged politician who accidentally kills a pedestrian in his car, at night, on a remote country road. Panicking and fearing scandal with an election imminent, he flees the scene and later desperately persuades his long-standing driver to take the rap. Servet promises to keep paying his salary into his bank account while he endures the short spell in prison and to pay a lump sum in cash on release. Deeply troubled, but utterly dependent on his employer's goodwill, the driver agrees, and the swallowed humiliation of this shabby deal worsens the already troubled family environment he leaves behind. His wife is a beautiful woman, though hardened and careworn by money worries, and by a family tragedy yet to be disclosed to the audience; his son is a young man in his early 20s who is worrying his parents by flunking out at college and getting in with a rough crowd.

There are aspects of Three Monkeys that look very much like Ceylan's earlier films: he creates wonderful, painterly, yet unsentimental visions of the Istanbul waterfront, and the cinematography and colour-palette this time have a mannered, desaturated look. The passing of the summer and the imminent arrival of winter are important, and there are some domestic images that are something of a motif for this director: people sitting around watching television.

The humble family flat at the beginning of the film is to be the venue for a clever "reveal" from Ceylan, which I suspect other directors may wish to pinch: The wife is asleep on the couch late at night with the TV on; the son, who had promised to be home long before this, creeps in very quietly so as not to wake her and, in shadow, goes to his room. She awakes and is baffled by a drop of blood on the floor; she pulls open her son's bedroom door and she - and we - are shocked to learn that his secret is not merely that he is a dirty stopout; he has been very badly beaten up. It is only now that Ceylan shows us her face in closeup, and we see how beautiful, and how troubled, she is. It is a quietly stylish film-making coup.

The rigour and intensity of Three Monkeys is invigorating - it is nourishing in a way few other films are. And the moments of metaphysical revelation, the arrival of ghosts, are stunning. But I couldn't help feeling that Three Monkeys was an over-egged pudding, a film trying to be too many things in too many styles and moreover poised on the edge of implausibility: a certain murderous act, and subsequent cover-up, are left rather conveniently unexplained. Ceylan has certainly produced an ambitious movie. But this kind of intensely worked drama is a creative cul-de-sac.