The background of the story is the economic crisis in Turkey. The photographer's cousin came to Istanbul from the countryside to find a job and borrowed his house. My cousin said he wanted to find a job as a sailor, because sailors can earn a lot of dollars and can travel around the world. But you're going to be traveling for a long time, and you can't stand being alone for that long, the photographer said. My cousin said, but I like to travel, and the point is to make money. So from the very beginning, the estrangement between the two has emerged in this dialogue without obvious conflict. This estrangement may be caused by the two people's different economic conditions and different perspectives, but it may also be deliberately done by the photographer.
The photographer, like all respectable relatives, brings his cousin to meet his friends. A friend said to the photographer: "You always say that you should make movies like Tarkovsky, so why don't you try to forget those past events?" It can be seen that although the photographer thinks he is superior to his cousin, he Sometimes they are ridiculed and laughed at by friends. In addition, this sentence may be the director's self-deprecation, or it may be the director's warning to those filmmakers and audiences who have abandoned art films, but in any case, it sets the tone of the film, declaring to the audience that this film is a A tribute to Tarkovsky.
After my cousin borrowed from the photographer's house, he also went out to find a job in the snow, but the economic situation was not good and it was difficult to find a job. Don't even think about the sailor's job. At night, he tried to watch TV with the photographer to get closer, but the photographer put Tarkovsky's "Stalker" in front of him, which his cousin couldn't understand. When the photographer was alone in the living room, he also stopped watching Stalker and started showing porn. Suddenly his cousin came out, and he had to tune the TV to another channel in a hurry. The cousin tried to watch with him again, but this time, the photographer became impatient and drove him back to the room.
Although he despised his cousin's soil and ignorance, the photographer also overheard his cousin's phone calls and did something that was never more decent than his cousin. During the phone call, the cousin told the family that the photographer was going to take him to Anatolia to take pictures of the tile factory, and if he gave him money, he could send it home and throw it in the faces of people who didn't trust them. After his cousin called, he was about to hide in another room, but stepped on the sticky mouse board placed on the door, and the eavesdropping was revealed. Later, when he hid in the bathroom to call his ex-wife, he found that the shadow of his cousin also flashed past the window.
When he arrived in Anatolia, his cousin smoked the cigarettes smoked by sailors, but he disliked the cigarettes too weak and did not smoke them. At the end of the trip, my cousin asked the photographer if he could help him find a job in the tile factory, but the photographer said, I have been photographing for them for ten years, and I don’t even have a discount for buying tiles, so don’t take advantage of your rich relatives. Later, when the photographer's pocket watch was nowhere to be found, he rummaged through boxes at home and suspected that his cousin had taken it. The cousin firmly denied it, but when the photographer found his pocket watch in a box, he didn't tell his cousin. , did not apologize to the cousin. It was also this incident that let his cousin know that he was unwelcome, that his childhood friendship with the photographer was long gone, and he decided to leave.
At the end of the movie, the sticky mouse board that had been stepped on by mistake finally stuck to the mouse. The photographer dared not deal with it, so he asked his cousin to throw it down. My cousin threw the mouse directly into the garbage, but he couldn't bear to see the mouse being eaten alive by the cat, so he picked it up, fell unconscious on the wall, and then threw it away. It can be said that this mouse is a metaphor for his cousin, but the photographer himself is not a mouse who is depressed and unable to succeed, hurts people and gets hurt.
It was not until the next day when the photographer secretly watched his ex-wife go abroad, and when he returned home, he found a bunch of keys hanging by the door, he realized his selfishness and arrogance, sat alone on the bench, and began to give him his cousin. seaman smokes cigarettes.
The plot of the film is typical of Chekhov, there is no obvious conflict, no climax, just one ordinary event after another that is not even an undercurrent, symbolizing the ubiquitous estrangement in life. Aside from the Anatolian landscape, you get the feeling that these things can happen anywhere on the planet, perhaps reflecting the Tarkovsky style of the film. However, although Ceylon is inheriting the critical spirit of its predecessors, this criticism is too outdated. Apart from the estrangement, he also seemed to express the burdens the photographer and his cousin brought to each other. But to some extent, this not only weakens the power of estrangement, but also paints the image of intellectuals a little too simplistically, which makes his films less contemporary. Ceylon seems to think that contemporary people can't talk about art as seriously as people in Tarkovsky's and even Chekhov's time, but you know, Chekhov himself doesn't think that any intellectuals took literature and art seriously . Therefore, what is really in line with the characteristics of the times may not be to continue to criticize the object of criticism by predecessors, but to criticize like them, and to shoot the kind of intellectual who is no longer proud and can put down his body and watch small movies with his cousin. And we all know that even so, there will still be a gap between people.
The film's sense of salute is too strong, but it contrasts with the specialness and inferiority of our times. It seems that we have not inherited the spirit of our predecessors. Not all times are as bad, but now it is worse.
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