The easy gag about the 196-minute Winter Sleep is that it’s so good it makes three and a half hours feel like two, but that’s no joke. Film-goers willing to commit the time, attention and emotional bandwidth to Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s finely tuned domestic drama will find themselves richly rewarded. The film serves not only as a mesmerising escape into another world, but also a compelling, compassionate deep dive into human frailty and self-deception.

Haluk Bilginer plays Aydin, a handsome former actor who has moved to the steppes of Cappadocia, Turkey, and opened a chic boutique hotel in one of the area’s curved stone caves, which he inherited from his father. Suffering from writer’s block (he’s researching the history of Turkish theatre), Aydin pens a high-minded column for the local paper while living with his beautiful younger wife, Nihal (Melisa Sozen), and his sister, Necla (Demet Akba). Such close proximity inevitably breeds their gentle contempt: although Aydin considers himself a progressive, enlightened thinker and humanist, the women in his life quietly know better. When a young boy impulsively throws a rock through Aydin’s car window one day, a series of encounters ensues that will rattle the ageing bohemian’s most cherished ideas about his principles, his community and his own deeply held moral code.

Aydin has carefully cultivated that code, especially when it comes to aesthetics (he writes about the scourge of urbanisation) and the workings of economic and social class. Only when Aydin comes face to face with his neighbours, family and guests does his hypocrisy come to the surface, made all the more uncomfortable when Nihal agrees to help raise money for a community school (he disapproves).

Winter Sleep is based on the short stories of Anton Chekhov, and Ceylan proves a worthy adapter of the Russian writer’s keenly observant dialogue and intimate atmosphere. In anyone else’s hands, a film composed mostly of people talking and arguing would feel stiflingly hemmed-in, but Ceylan expertly calibrates the conversations so they ebb, flow and grow in urgency with reflective, unforced dynamism. What’s more, he frequently opens the action to the magnificent surrounding countryside, an austere, otherworldly landscape populated by long-standing families, sophisticated global adventurers and elegant, wild-looking horses.

It is a dramatic, suitably sweeping backdrop for Aydin and his cohorts to investigate the enduring questions that Winter Sleep explores, from how best to address poverty to the nature of power, morality and self-awareness.

As Aydin continues to navigate the slippery situational ethics of his position — as landowner, husband, self-impressed intellectual — Winter Sleep gathers momentum and substantive steam. No matter how breathtaking the backdrop, Ceylan’s deepest interest lies in the thorny politics of simple human kindness and the monumental human drama of people going about the awkward, painful business of trying to be good.

By arrangement with The Washington Post

Published in Dawn February 1st, 2015

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