Three Monkeys makes valiant strides toward coming alive as a piece of storytelling,
which I should admit has not been my customary experience of the one and a half Ceylan films I have seen. I bailed on Climates once his addiction to the
pathetic fallacy of seasonally-mirrored emotions reached unbearable levels, so I didn't see the wintry passages that I hear are the most interesting. I did witness the much-remarked
scene of living-room fisticuffs with the added, jokey addition of that hazelnut getting pinged all over the floor, which reminded me of the Tarkovsky/porn punchline in
Distant that no one who has seen that film is liable to forget. One good laugh per Ceylan film seems like his typical quota, and
Three Monkeys follows through with a hilariously long scene of a woman desperate to find her cell-phone in her enormous purse, while it emits a truly humiliating
ringtone amidst a very tense errand. Whether the recurrence of this absurd motif gives Three Monkeys its welcome sense of increased levity, I can't say;
it's just as likely that I felt relieved that Ceylan wasn't pummeling us quite so early and often with those digitally amplified shots of leaden cloud-cover to which
he seems so incorrigibly drawn. But drawn he eventually is, and when Three Monkeys starts running out of story and steam, it betrays a deflating sense of
Ceylan grasping at all of his old straws, and lots of other people's too: literally heavy weather, close-ups that become even more photographically oppressive as they
become more emotionally mute, as crude an "idea" about class relations filtered through sexual treacheries as that which Christian Petzold fumbled around with in this year's
Jerichow, and repeated doses of what peak-period Joe Bob Briggs would have called Dead Child Fu.
I'll hand it to Ceylan that his complex and claustrophobic framings of doorways and hallways in the film's main location holds some occasional interest, especially in one
scene where the dead, wet kid first appears, and I heartily recommend that he keep exploring his nascent puckishness, palpable too in a scene where the female
lead performs extravagant and hugely inconvenient faux-politeness about accepting a ride. But Ceylan keeps placing bets that his crustacean lighting and surfaces
and his fascination with dour, unverbalized emotional states among small casts of characters will be enough to bear out an evolving career. Cannes keeps toasting him for
reaching into the same small bag of tricks, so who am I to object, but I remain skeptical that Ceylan is anywhere near the artist that his most fervent fans and his
repetitive films would have us believe. Grade:C+
