Winter sleep (2014)

Winter sleep. Finally I’ve watched this movie, this movie won Palm d’Or awards at Cannes this year. Winter Sleep is a masterpiece by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, a film shining with literary eloquence and incisive social criticism.  Most of movie scenes happened inside village houses, a lot of talking between character. It tells a story, with an old actor turned into hotel owner, his young wife, other villager who are his tenants, different people have their own social character.

This is the kind of film where not much happens, but your jaw drops at every scene because Ceylan has filmed reality better than most of us live it. It is honestly quite scary. Most of our lives mutter on without us ever reflecting on it, properly anyway, because we don't really get the chance. However, when you watch Winter Sleep you can see a part of yourself in pretty much every character. You understand every person's actions in the film and there is no greater exemplification that, at least between the three main characters, the line of good and bad is ever so blurred. Everyone has their reasons, everyone has good intentions, but yet people just cannot get along harmoniously because they are naturally different.

Winter Sleep is a film that I respect massively, I probably have to say though, that I respect it more than what I actually enjoyed it. It's a huge, colossal film that nearly owns it's two hundred minutes, even if it was way too much for my numbing back and drained energy. It's a film that will surely only be appreciated by a small amount of people, Nuri Bilge Ceylan has gained in me a follower but I don't believe he will make many friendships with main audiences who will soon discard such a long, slowly paced Turkish drama. It is a challenging film that ultimately rewards its audience with some powerful images and palpable strain. The audience in the theater seemed to be in awe, me I was simply left satisfied and with a huge respect for the piece.



I liked that in each piece of conversation, we really get to learn more about them and their conflicts. While there are plenty of interesting reflections on moral values, I felt some of these discussions were quite long at times, making them exhausting to watch. Still, Winter Sleep is a fascinating work that not only contains beautiful landscapes of the Anatolian Steppes, it also has some incredibly rich character development where we can all identify with these people's actions and arguments to some extent.

 It's a thoroughly engrossing, thoughtful and beautiful film and if the length doesn't intimate Academy voters too much, this is an easy frontrunner for the Foreign Language Film Oscar.

IMDB : 8.9/10
Metacritics : 83/100
Rotten Tomatoes: 90%
Mine: 8.5/10