A good movie

To be honest, I really had no idea what to expect from this flick but since it had won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, I was really eager to check it out. Well, with a running time of more than 3 hours, it was definitely a challenging watch and the fact that basically nothing much happened through the whole thing didn’t help either. At least, Nuri Bilge Ceylan did deliver a beautiful movie to look at but since the characters didn’t go really anywhere, it did become rather monotonous fairly quickly. So, what did the guy try to achieve with this rather overlong flick? In my opinion, it was some kind of character study dealing with emptiness and boredom. Indeed, at first, the main character seemed to be a soft-spoken educated and sophisticated man. However, it became obvious pretty quickly that the guy was terribly self-absorbed and had no connection with his community but not much more with his sister and his wife. I mean, most of the dialogues involved some seemingly intellectual conversations but, at the end of the day, it was only some platitudes and I’m not surprised that the director had been inspired by Russian literature. Of course, you could blame the main character but, in my opinion, his sister and his wife were not really much better. Indeed, they were both complaining about how boring and empty their life had become, mostly blaiming the main character for it, but it was rather dubious that their lives had been so difficult and, above all, they were not willing to do anything to really improve their situation. Concerning the main character, he spent most of his time trying to convince everyone around him of how important he was when, in fact, the only thing he pretty much did was aimlessly wandering around. Still, 3 hours was quite a long time to spend with some characters who were neither really likeable and/or interesting after all. Anyway, to conclude, even if it is not an easy movie, it was still a decent watch and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you like the genre.