Winter Sleep
Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Opens December 19
Among the great, perhaps not entirely incidental pleasures of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s cinema are the middle-aged male faces which linger in his forbiddingly long takes—a Rushmorian array of stoic, weather-worn handsomeness, exhausted mustaches, wind-thinned hair. Haluk Bilginer, who plays Aydin, the retired actor-turned-country squire at the center of Winter Sleep, has the ragged continental hairline, charcoal eyebrows and deflated cheeks of a very late-period (and, y’know, Turkish) James Mason. A former stage star returned home to Anatolia to run a hotel and maintain his father’s property holdings, write a column for a local newspaper, and research a definitive history of Turkish theatre, Aydin is most often found in his study, where gold lamplight pools on rough stucco walls, amid piles of books, play posters and artifacts.
