Movie Review: Distant

Distant, written/directed by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is a study in minimalism and minute day-to-day emotions. If there is a movie that bears out with excruciating sensibility the adage "Familiarity breeds contempt," it is this.

A simple story of a cousin from the country come visiting his more well-to-do relative in the city to hunt for a job, the film explores the straining of relations as the visitor seems like an intruder in the host's life.

What makes this compelling viewing and so absorbing despite its mundaneness is the powerful angst, the suppressed resentment, the bottled up anger of the host at the disruption and the bewilderment of the country cousin at the treatment he has to put up with (leaving cigarette stubs, not flushing the toilet properly...) as also a distant, unfamiliar city -- all such emotion of pain, chafing, disappointment, hope allowed to develop and foment and well-up to the extent possible in the normal span of a movie. Like cigarette smoke that is allowed to curl up, ever so slowly, unhurriedly, like the look of disappointment mixed with dejection that is allowed time to register and settle and pinch the face...

Some stills from the movie here, two of the most symbolic I reproduce below: