- Nuri Bilge Ceylan followed in prestigious footsteps when he won the Best Director prize at Cannes last year, an award won by Haneke, Schnabel, and Inarritu in the previous three years.
- Indeed, Three Monkeys' direction is discernibly present, most noticeably in his manipulation of light and color, both inside the clammy flat, and out. As is obvious in the above pic, Ceylan captures the atmosphere above Turkey with such vividness that it becomes as melodramatic a character as any of the foursome that the film centers on.
- Opening with a trio of stunning nighttime shots, Ceylan's picture then moves at a leisurely pace, lenser Gokhan Tiryaki soaking up the tension between mother and son, and later, husband and wife, with an evenness of long shots and extreme close-ups. Captured on Sony HD (the same camera used for the one shot Russian Ark), Ceylan and Tiryaki let dark greens, blues and grays dominate the screen at all times, a spectacle that's admittedly more pleasurable than Fincher's digital Benjamin Button.
- The film's plot is quite simple (though I dare not spoil the opening segment), and allows for the mentioned visual meditations, though Ceylan's storytelling is not flawless. While he subtly touches on themes of guilty and infidelity, he fails to paint a complete picture of the film's most important character; although well-played by Hatice Aslan, Hacer is something of an empty slot. If we are to completely believe the totality of her actions, Ceylan must give us some hint of motivation--at the risk of coming off misogynistic. Also, the film's circularity is, at least to me, too neat, lacking the power to really hit
- title refers to the japanese maxim: "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil," but probably refers to the three central characters, reduced by guilt and incommunicability to primitive behavior.
8/beautifully shot study of alienation and guilt within a (three-person) Turkish family
