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Our Man in Cannes: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s best film ever
CANNES, France — Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan of Turkey has been a critical favorite in Cannes ever since “Climates” premiered here a few years ago.
He has been so well-regarded among film snobs that Joel and Ethan Coen last year showed a short film about a cowboy (Josh Brolin) who goes to an L.A. theater and asks the ticket seller to describe “Climates.”
The result was hilarious, in a Coen brothers kind of way. (Ceylan typically focuses on moods, not events, so “Climates” is quite hard to describe.)
So it was interesting to see Ceylan’s latest, “The Three Monkeys,” on Thursday night. I’ve never been a big Ceylan fan. I respect his work, especially the cinematography. But I’ve usually been faced with watching his movies at 10 p.m. here in Cannes, and if there’s not much going on up on the big screen, I tend to nod. (That’s a horrible admission, but it happens all the time. I sat next to a critic who slept last night.)
Remarkably enough, I was engrossed by “The Three Monkeys” from the very beginning. It’s the best Ceylan film ever, not that such a comment will mean much to most people.
It focuses on a politician who is involved in a hit-and-run on a dark, lonely road. He gets out of the car, but hides when another vehicle shows up. The driver doesn’t stop to help, but calls police with the license plate number of the abandoned politician’s car.
The politician, knowing he’s in trouble, pays a man who occasionally works as his driver to confess to the hit-and-run and go to prison. Regular paychecks will be sent to his family, and a big payday will come when he is freed, should he remain silent.
To say any more would give away too much of the plot. But one deception leads to another, and another, and another.
Ceylan’s cinematography is wonderful, once again.
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