Critics reviews

Winter Sleep, which Ceylan co-wrote with his wife, Ebru Ceylan, his co-star in 2006's Climates, is his most dialogue-heavy film, full of discourses on morality, conscience, self-justification and self-recrimination. To return to Chekhov, the proverbial rifle over the mantelpiece is never fired — but Ceylan keeps you ever aware of its cocked-and-loaded presence.

Ceylan has invoked Chekhov many times in his previous films, but this might be his first attempt since The Small Town to capture that sense of life unfolding beneath the characters' constant chatter... It may not always succeed, but the lovely, perplexing Winter Sleep is a very personal film from one of the world's foremost filmmakers. It's well worth your time.

Winter Sleep is a major step back from Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), I think. A too-long film buoyed by a few very good scenes, Winter Sleep is essentially a Woody Allen movie (a portrait of the artist as conflicted, self-absorbed, aging intellectual) with too few jokes.

This movie struck me as both Ceylan's plainest, and perhaps his finest... The movie, which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, has been disparaged by some skeptical critics as a gabfest, and it's true, there's a lot of talk here, and very little of it's small. But that's not to say that the film is glacially paced; even when staying in the same settings, Ceylan's camerawork and editing are terrifically alert.

WINTER SLEEP does indeed require each one of its 3 hours and 16 minutes in order to fully illustrate Aydin's predicament in both its tragedy and ridiculousness (the film is at times surprisingly funny), and no contemporary director has a better compositional eye than Ceylan, who was a professional photographer before he turned to filmmaking. Perhaps not as formally perfect as ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA, this is nonetheless a spellbinding experience--masterfully written, directed and performed.

Winter Sleep is a sweepingly ambitious film that explores concepts of the male ego and patriarchal classism; it's also, in effect, a character study, though certainly not an insular one. In fact, Ceylan's epic, novelistic aims take a great step forward after his excellent Once Upon a Time in Anatolia by further demonstrating the dramatic interlocking of characters, story, and setting.

Winter Sleep is well worth seeing for Bilginer's work alone. That it's also gorgeous is just gravy. Unfortunately, Ceylan isn't entirely averse to speechifying. His inspiration for the film was a couple of short stories by Anton Chekhov, and at roughly its midpoint, he takes the camera inside the hotel and has Aydin engage in two of the longest and most stultifying conversations ever filmed

In genre terms, the movie can be classed as a character study although it often plays more like one of those spiritual autopsies that directors occasionally perform on their protagonists, gutting them with degrees of gravity, glee and precision and extracting flaws like diseased organs. Mr. Ceylan performs this particular operation with rigorous solemnity, technical virtuosity and precision tools, yet there's something missing from the very start, namely the spark of breathed-in life.

The deft arrangement of scenes, with motifs from the characters' pontifications recurring unacknowledged in actual social scenarios, contributes to the film's pathos and deep but mirthless humor. All this was true as well of Ceylan‘s last film, his masterpiece to date, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, but there, the poignantly human-sized drama was counterpointed by the grave backdrop of a criminal investigation, lyrical road-movie exteriors, and desperate comedy. Here, the drama is levelled out.

Beautiful to look at, with its burnished interiors and magnificent Turkish steppes, this long film builds to a powerful conclusion. Ceylan's characters grind each other to a powder while hardly raising their voices.

Ceylan paces this thin dramatic sketch as if it were a Wagner opera, with ponderous pauses and fraught gazes yearning toward depths that the movie doesn't reach. The actors deliver their lines with predictable tones; unusual and enticing landscapes are mainly decorative; there's a lack of information, imagination, context, and inner life; and the three-hour-plus running time makes the movie's title seem snarkily apt.

Ceylan continues to use his extensive running times to novelistic effect, crafting a multifarious portrait of a character whose ridiculous tendencies run deep, humanizing him while simultaneously revealing the entrenched, conservative malevolence that fuels his actions. Staring deep into the darkness of an apparently static character, the director again exhibits his gift for making interesting stories out of predetermined plots, locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics.