When I told my wife we would be watching a long, modern Turkish film next, her first reaction was to ask whether or not it’s by the same director as Winter Sleep. Indeed this was made by Nuri Bilge Ceylan and its screenplay was co-written by him and his wife Ebru Ceylan. Unfortunately while I found the dialogue in Winter Sleep to be almost magical, the dialogue here while being similarly wordy feels mostly dead to me, as if it tries too hard to be insightful but reveals nothing much of note.

Sinan Kurasu returns to a home town that he detests after finishing university. He is contemptuous towards his schoolteacher father Idris who has frittered his money away gambling and spends his time on futile projects like digging a well on top of a hill. When his mother asks for his help to rein in his father, he scolds her for marrying a useless man. At the same time, his peers have to cope with poor economic prospects, taking up unpopular jobs like being a riot police officer or in the case of a local girl marrying a rich middle-aged man. Sinan himself seems doomed to follow in the footsteps of his father as a schoolteacher due to his poor academic results but he really wishes to be a writer instead. He has written a book on the local people and culture and seems convinced that it will successful if only he can scrounge up the money to get it printed.

The first half of this film is pretty hard to get through as we struggled to discern any sort of coherent theme in the narrative beyond the most banal one that life is hard for everyone everywhere. This is exacerbated by how Sinan is a thoroughly unlikable and unsympathetic character. He claims to loathe all humanity and constantly behaves as if he were the only intelligent person in the room and knows better than anyone else about everything. When he notices a well known local writer in a bookshop and approaches him for advice, he behaves just as arrogantly and ends up picking a fight over artistic integrity and writers being poseurs. It is a wonder that he makes it through the whole film without being beaten up. The second half is better as the theme coalesces into a stark contrast between Sinan and his father and we realize that we really aren’t meant to like Sinan at all. By the time the credits roll, you’re left with an ending that isn’t half bad, but you still need to wade through a lot of confusing and frankly unnecessary scenes to get there.

One thing that is not in doubt is that this is a beautiful film. The cinematography is just as fantastic as it was in Winter Sleep with the same person Gökhan Tiryaki behind the camera. I think it must be a deliberate decision on the part of Ceylan to so strongly contrast the freezing winter landscape of his last film with the stifling summer heat of this one. Even so this film suffers from problems with flow and pacing. Some of the transitions seem strangely abrupt and may be intended to show that some scenes occur only in Sinan’s imagination. Others seem like simple mistakes like the pace of conversations that don’t match the images of time flowing at the correct as the light changes and the characters walk. Indeed with how uninteresting the talking points of the dialogue are, it seems to me that the director simply wanted to fill the auditory space with some voices while his primary focus is on the visual imagery. It’s a complete reversal of what the director achieved in the previous film that I’m shocked.

While there is some merit in the visuals and I appreciated the authenticity of some of the vignettes on life in the Turkish countryside, this film is overall a terrible disappointment. There’s no spark in the dialogue, none of the offered insights are illuminating and while everyone in the film grouses over how tough life is, no one dares to voice anything out against the government. I’m not sure where this one went wrong but perhaps one reason is that this is a completely original work whereas Winter Sleep was loosely adapted from a short story by Anton Chekhov. It’s a beautiful film but while it seems as if it is saying something about the human condition, in the end it says nothing at all.