Winter Sleep

Nuri Ceylan’s Winter Sleep explores the need to find values one can live by in the contemporary world free of religious trappings. (That’s how the drunken teacher Levent puts it: in raki veritas.) Set and filmed in rural Turkey it represents the elemental pivot point between Islam and the West.

The film is essentially the anatomy of Aydin, a secular intellectual/artist/businessman, who pretends to conscience and morality as he judges (and oppresses) others but falls well short on both counts himself, frozen by his arrogance. The film opens on an arid landscape, under infernal billowing white smoke. It ends on the hero’s estate covered in snow and ice.

After 25 years acting on stage and screen (but never in soaps!) Aydin has retreated to run a petty empire in the countryside. He owns a small hotel which he keeps “natural,” preferring muddy roads over gravel. He inherited local property so is very wealthy, a condition he also defends as “natural.” He writes a weekly column in a small local paper, but won’t venture into a major publication. The fish feels larger in the small pond. He’s so proudly isolated he has never been to the nearby village. He gets a vicarious thrill out of his adventurous tenants, like the motorcyclist and the young Japanese hikers. When Aydin gets an email from a local teacher he summons his wife and neighbour to hear her adulation, under the pretence of asking their advice on responding to her request for financial help.

Ceylan makes Aydin admirable and sympathetic at the outset, then gradually exposes him. His vanity in reading that email is our first clue to his failings, as well as his alienation from his wife Nihal. At first a beautiful enigmatic phantom in the home, she emerges as a repressed, frozen-out young woman who has finally found self-realization in running a charity project, raising funds to improve the village’s schools for the poor. 

Aydin spoils that by intruding upon her group’s climactic meeting, then by insisting upon taking over her bookkeeping on the project. He says he suspects the others of fraud and wants to preserve their family name. That, we later learn, he has already compromised when he turned earthquake victims away from his hotel in order to accommodate the paying members of relief agencies. His association, not Nihal’s inexperience, would poison her project. Aydin is at his ugliest when he smiles condescendingly throughout Nihal’s weeping complaint at his destructive treatment.

As coldly detached as Aydin now is from his wife, after years of conflict, he also tries to remove himself from what’s happening around him. He doesn’t listen to messages. When a second-generation tenant falls into rental arrears, Aydin tells the younger brother Hamdi not to bother him anymore. He claims his assistant Hidayet and his lawyers do everything on their own. Aydin feels no responsibility for the cruelty a wild horse suffers when caught for him. 

He wants a horse in order to live up to the image on the hotel’s website. As he quotes Omar Sharif’s advice: “Acting is honesty.” To Aydin no other honesty is required but a persuasive act. Despite his commitment to Turkish theatre, his walls are adorned with theatre posters from the west, Shakespeare and Caligula. His hotel is named Othello. The cosmopolitan pretence rings as hollow as his moralizing.

Aydin frees the horse when he leaves Nihal and sets out for Istanbul. He is jolted into self-awareness when he instead goes for a drunken evening and morning hunt with neighbour Suavi and schoolteacher Levent. Levent’s babble confronts Aydin with his earthquake shame. The combination of brandy and guilt give the controlled and controlling Aydin his first breakdown. He vomits. 

The next morning he shoots a rabbit and finds it, still quivering with last life. That breaks down the detachment he has maintained between himself and the abuses of nature he has ordered, whether toward animals or his tenants. He returns to beg Nihal to forgive and to stay with him. When he admits he knows she doesn’t love him anymore but doesn’t want to be away from her, he lets her define their relationship. In submitting to her he shows he has grown from his catharsis. He awakens from his winter sleep.

At the end Aydin finally starts writing his long-researched history of Turkish theatre. At least beginning that book means he is finally putting out something significant, instead of just absorbing the energies of others and writing a pettily controversial column. In morality as in writing (as the travel writer observed), “The hard part is beginning.” In his argument with his sister Necla Aydin stresses the need to do something, not just think about it, assuming his local superiority over her inactivity.

In a breakfast conversation Necla proposes to confront evil by submitting to it. She postulates that instead of resisting evil, thus further provoking its agent, by submitting to it one can perhaps arouse the malfeasant’s conscience. She even considers asking her drunken ex-husband to forgive her for divorcing him, in hopes that might convert him to sobriety. “Islam,” of course, means “submission,” though that usually refers to Mohammad not to evil. 

In addition to his secularity, the other Islamic cornerstones that Aydin violates are brotherhood and charity. Neighbour Suavi is literally what Aydin is metaphorically: a lonely isolate, who after his wife’s death closed off several rooms and retreated to his living room stove. But Suavi has warm relationships with others, like the teacher, and he has actively joined Nihal’s project. 

Aydin’s callous treatment of his suffering tenants and the earthquake incident prove his total lack of charity. When he gives Nihal a large donation it’s to try to buy off her anger at his intrusion. Of course, he tells Suavi and Levent about his “anonymous” gift to bolster his image. His “charity” is disqualified by his self-interest.

When Nihal gives that money to the unfortunate tenants she seems to counteract her husband, turning his conscience money to effective use. That family is a microcosm of current Islam. The younger brother Hamdi is the local imam, who gives sermons and struggles on a small salary to support his jobless older brother Ishmael, his sister-in-law and nephew, and their aging, ailing and ungrateful mother. Yet Aydin writes a column criticizing the imam for not setting a proper example in maintaining his yard. Despite their long tenancy, Aydin has allowed the family to be dunned by a collection agency, the police, and confiscators of their TV and other goods. Ishmael was humiliated by an assault in front of his family. 

Hamdi is a good man, who serves the community with Koranic wisdom. But he proves powerless trying to mediate between the wealthy landlord and the violent rebel. Hamdi reluctantly accepts the money from Nihal, but Ishmael proves self-destructive in his sense of violated honor. Ishmael went to jail for -- in a perversion of Islamic respect for women -- stabbing a brute who stole his wife’s underwear and then teased him. Now, as he recounts his various shame by Aydin, he rejects the money that would restore his family’s honour and throws it in the fire instead. That bears out Aydin’s warning that Nahil is naive in her sense of people’s character. 

“Ishmael,” of course, was Hagar’s son, the original Moslem banished from Abraham’s family. The original Moslem here becomes the first radical. When he slaps his son Ilyas for smashing Aydin’s van window with a rock, then breaks his own window with his hand, Ishmael tries the Old Testament “eye for an eye” justice. 

The Grade V boy Ilyas is an intensely resentful figure who stones the landlord’s van, then falls into a faint and a fever when his imam uncle tries to get him to apologize to Aydin and kiss his imperious hand. If Ishmael’s burning of the money evokes the self-destruction of the Islamic militant, son Ilyas represents the outer-directed destruction to come. When Ilyas broke the window and fled, he fell into a stream. Hidayet drives him home so he wouldn’t get sick. But the boy gets pneumonia when the imam brings him to apologize to Aydin. The incident causes what Hidayet tried to prevent. 

     This three-hour-plus film has such long, meaty discussions that a single viewing can’t be expected to apprehend its multiple themes and nuances. But this should encourage you to undertake this challenging experience.