Weekend Viewing Notes

THE BIRDS

My (one week shy of) eight year-old really loves the Universal monster movies, but she's been asking for something scarier. She's pleading for The Ring or Night of the Living Dead. I debated between The Birds and Jaws until better judgment prevailed on me and I elected to save Bruce for another time.

Sometimes I wonder whether we overrate Hitchcock's thrillers a bit. It typically comes in the context of asking whether I'd regard his films so highly if they were made today. That's a faulty standard for a couple of reasons. First, they weren't made today, but forty or fifty years ago, when the cinematic language underlying these psychological thrill shows didn't exist. He invented it. I might as well ask whether a biplane would be appreciated in the jet age. What's more, though, they simply aren't making thrillers this rich today. Even a somewhat lesser work like The Birds has so much going on, and what my daughter doesn't get now (and what I didn't get until I was older), is how thoroughly we are putty in Hitchcock's hands. He's so good at misdirection that we scarcely realize how little a movie called The Birds is actually about birds (unless we're talking about lovebirds). How else to account for the ending being wholly satisfying despite the fact that the threat of the birds is neither explained nor dispatched with finality? The brief shot of Mitch's mother comforting Melanie, the former acting uncharacteristically nurturing and the latter uncharacteristically needing to be nurtured, is all the resolution we need. The birds are a MacGuffin.

Of course, the definitive proof that today's thrillers are generally playing in the shallow end comes when you pick up Hitchcock/Truffaut, read the ten or so pages they devote to the film, and see that every image and connection on the screen was deliberately purposeful on Hitchcock's part, and more even than you observed. And most of today's directors of thrillers, given myriads of junket opportunities to give their films subtext and meaning, have trouble filling more than a couple of paragraphs before lapsing into cliche.

If I knew a budding cinephile in his or her mid-teens, I'd buy a couple of months of Netflix and a copy of Hitchcock/Truffaut and just stand back.



UZAK (DISTANT)

What a fantastic meditation on habits. I've been thinking lately about the role habits play in our lives, how they are formed or destroyed and how we choose them or prefer them to meaningful human interaction. Ceylan's been thinking about these topics, too, and he's got this wonderful film to show for it.

Mahmet is a commercial photographer living in a well-kept and pleasantly-decorated apartment in Istanbul. His life is depicted as a routine consisting of ad photographs taken rather mechanically followed by hours spent alone in front of the television, interspersed with wordless sex with a woman and meals eaten alone. His cousin Yusuf has lost his factory job in the country and comes to stay with Mahmet while he looks for work. With some inconvenience and expressed annoyance, Mahmet adjusts his schedule to accomodate Yusuf's presence. He picks up after Yusuf and grumbles at his slovenliness. Both Mahmet and Yusuf smoke (the quintessential symbol of an unbreakable habit), but Mahmet comes to resent Yusuf's smoking and declares his own intention to quit. Ceylan's own apartment was used for Mahmet's place, and in an interview on the DVD, he explains that the character is based on his own person of a few years ago.

As the film progresses, we are dropped hints that Mahmet wasn't always this way. A conversation with his ex-wife tells us that he was once part of a family on the cusp of having children. A conversation with other photographers and samples of his work hanging on his apartment walls tell us that Mahmet once harbored photographic ambitions that exceeded advertisements for a tile factory. It becomes clear that Mahmet's insularity and fussiness are both the cause and effect of his aloneness.

Appropriate to an exploration of the distance between people and the way in which routine can kill the desire to live, the film moves quietly and slowly. It ends with the simple question posed to Mahmet: does he prefer his solitary life and his stand-ins for pleasure, or is there more satisfaction to be found in the company of his slob cousin who can't keep cigarette ashes off the rug? Of course, answering that question ham-fistedly is the stuff of artless movies.

Mahmet sits alone again on a bench, smoking Yusuf's cigarettes and staring at the seaport. The question is answered in the knowing and the asking.