Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Three Monkeys” and the Dardenne brothers’ “Le Silence de Lorna” are two films that provoked feelings of admiration at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and not without reason.  Ceylan is one of the consistent Turkish auteurs whose filmography is distinguished for the austere and cinematographic-specific way it treats its subject matter. The same applies to the Dardenne brothers who have created a distinctive filming style that deftly oscillates between emotional detachment and intense involvement.

Among other similarities, the two films share an emphasis on cinematographic narration in the way Robert Bresson understood it, that is, as a diegetic form that is not subservient to the plot or the scenario. In both films, the camera does not function as a means of reproduction of a pro-filmic reality, but as an instigator of emotions, gestures and responses that are not necessarily predetermined by the script. On the surface, they seem to manipulate the clichéd genre of the social problem film. However, it is not the story line that distinguishes these films, but the formal elaboration of the content that avoids oversimplistic moral polarisations and frustrates the audience’s desire for identification with the characters. Ceylan’s and the Dardennes’ visual code does not provide the spectators with an indication of the characters’ emotional state, making the representation quite perplexed rather than transparent. Evidently, Ceylan and the Dardennes present their audiences with dilemmas that can be probed but not necessarily solved. The viewer is asked to participate actively either in the hermeneutical construction or by acknowledging the crisis of meaning. In many ways, an avenue of investigation that goes back to the postulates of the 1970s film theory, which argued that the political implications of a film lie in the elaboration of the form and not on the political subject-matter, could be productive. In this context, “Three Monkeys” and “The Silence of Lorna” treat two very simple stories in such a way that the whole idea of cinematic representation becomes the object of political and critical scrutiny.

Searching for the truth

Ceylan’s film, which won him the Best Director’s award at Cannes, gets its title from the well-known myth of the three monkeys that hear no evil, see no evil and fear no evil. The film starts with Servet (Ercan Kesal), a wealthy businessman running a campaign for the upcoming election, who under the influence of alcohol runs over a pedestrian. When another car approaches nearby, he panics and runs away. Servet, in a state of shock phones his chauffer, Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl), who lives in Yedicule, a depraved area in Istanbul, and offers him a generous fee to take the rap and go to prison for a brief amount of time. Eyüp accepts the offer and his imprisonment will intertwine him and his family in a series of events with fatal results. Eyüp’s wife, Hacer (Hatice Aslan) urged by her son İsmail (Ahmet Rıfat Şungar), will visit Servet’s office to ask for a financial favour. Eventually she will engage in an affair with him that will be identified by İsmail. After Eyüp’s release from prison, Hacer will realise that she is still emotionally involved with Servet, whereas this is not the case for him who defies her brutally. Yet, her husband judging from her strange behaviour will discover she was cheating on him. One night Eyüp will be called to the police station to learn that Servet has been murdered. In an intense scene of a family uproar Ismail will admit having committed the murder. The film ends with Eyüp making a proposition to Bayram (Cafer Köse), a poor man working and staying in a wrenched café, to pay him to take the responsibility for Servet’s murder.

The film borrows heavily from melodrama. What makes the narrative more intense, however, is the avoidance of non-diegetic music. This means that one of the constitutive formal aspects of melodrama, that is the melos (music) is absent. Instead, the emphasis on everyday sounds, such as the wind, footsteps, or the mobile phone ringtones creates feelings of intensity, because the soundtrack does not facilitate the viewer’s response into the narrative sequence nor does it reflect the characters’ emotional state. At the same time, the dramatic aspects of the film are rendered problematic as well, since the portrayal of the dramatis personae does not provides us with clear-cut hints with regard to their psychological state of affairs. The characters speak as if they are quoting the emotions, something which can be observed in the scene, taking place in Servet’s office and in the intimate erotic scene between Eyüp and Hacer after the former’s release from prison. This is a point of convergence with the cinema of Robert Bresson, whose characters, as Andre Bazin points out “are not asked to act out a text, not even to live it out, just to speak it” (Bazin 133). The Turkish director seems to have accepted at face value Bertolt Brecht’s instruction that the actor should be showing that he is quoting a character. Such an aesthetic approach removes the narrative and the plot from the centre of interest and what is promoted instead is an understanding of film as a documentation of the actors’ performances (Byg 101). These defamiliarizing techniques are heightened by the preference for long takes and still images that do not follow the stereotypical pattern of continuity editing. The camera movement is austere in such a way, that all the expressive emotions are purged favouring the body gestures on the part of the characters. In this context, the performance of the actors minimises psychological realism, creating formal compositions and placing emphasis on the physical relationships between the characters.

The scenes shot in Eyüp’s apartment can reinforce our previous comments. The camera remains stationary and the movement that occurs within the frame is the outcome of the actors’ movement in the diegetic space. For instance, the first scene taking place in the apartment is when Servet phones Eyüp after the accident. Here, what instigates motion is the sound of the telephone, a pattern that will be repeated throughout the film. In another scene, Hacer’s mobile phone rings for a certain amount of time, whereas the camera remains still, until the phone call stirs Eyüp’s curiosity. This emphasis on the mobility of the bodies structures the film as an exploration of different possibilities and not as a photographic reproduction of events described in a predetermined script. Plan-sequences replace cutting and when a character exits the frame the camera does not necessarily follow him or her, but it rests on the empty screen, paying attention to the diegetic space as a motivator of movement.

Apparently, Ceylan does not favour a cinema of montage and his preference for such an austere cinematography alludes to the films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Jean-Marie Straub. From the former he borrows the penchant for long takes and sepia tone images — from the latter, the focus on the materiality of the gestures created by the actors’ performances. In many ways, “Three Monkeys” privileges formal abstraction over conventional character portrayal and a discernible narrative direction. Ceylan demands that the audience read the signs not in combination, as in the traditional story-bound cinema, but in contradiction. To this effect, the unmotivated camera movements focus on details that do not necessarily promote the plot. Sombre images of the natural environment are juxtaposed to the narrative sequence, showing nature’s indifference (or perhaps response) to the narrated events. For instance, at the end of the film we see a prolonged still image of the Sea of Marmara and the diegesis comes to a halt frustrating the audience’s expectation for narrative resolution. In Noel Burch’s words, this preference for “the sudden intrusion of more or less ‘natural’ contingencies in the totally artificial world of the work of art, in which in principle they are completely out of place” constitutes an “open” film work (Burch 105).

The underlying assumption is that “Three Monkeys” refuses to reproduce a concrete story line based upon a script with a clear-cut beginning, middle and end. This can be seen in the extended use of temporal ellipses, which make the sequences function more like constellations. Further, in many plan-sequences the lapse of time is unspecified to such an extent that the story is deprived of any inspiration to temporal diegetic verisimilitude. Yet, the story functions as an instigator of possibilities, emotions, reactions and gestures with the view to eliciting a variety of responses on the part of the audience. For instance, before we get to know that Servet has been murdered, there is a scene that shows Hacer leaving her flat, something which is noticed by her husband. The diegetic locality and temporality do no change for a protracted amount of time, until we learn that Servet is dead. However, we cannot declare with certainty who is responsible for the murder. Ismail’s confession towards the end of the film clouds the issue instead of clarifying it, creating a disjunction between the images and the dialogic parts. When he asserts “I did it,” we are not sure whether he’s referring to Servet or his little brother who seems to have killed accidentally years ago. Throughout the film we learn that Eyüp’s family has lost a child, whose death remains a mystery. The child appears in many scenes in dream style images problematising the whole concepts of appearance, reality, memory, guilt and loss.

It is in this manner that Ceylan bridges the gap between cinema and life asking the audience to rethink whether the selectivity of the images shown, a cinema-specific trait, might apply to the real life itself. In many respects, the director argues that memory and our understanding of the world are structured upon a selective organisation of the facts, which makes it difficult to achieve an accurate and objective comprehension of the social and political reality. Such an approach is analogous to the fundamental late-Marxist axiom according to which political oppression resides in the invisibility rather than the visibility of social structure. On the whole, the film’s subtlety lies in the fact that it does not simply intend to provoke feelings of sympathy for the oppressed. By contrast, it attempts to investigate, to search out for the truth, in the Marxist sense that “not only the result, but the road to it also, is part of the truth” (qtd in Walsh 45).

On the impossibility of silence.

“Le Silence de Lorna,” which won the Prix du scenario at 2008′s Cannes Film Festival, narrates the story of a young Albanian immigrant, Lorna (Arta Dobroshi), who wants to open a snack bar in Belgium with her boyfriend. In order to achieve her plan, Lorna gets involved in a fake marriage with a drug addict, Claudy (Jérémie Renier). This marriage, devised by Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione) will give Lorna Belgian citizenship. For his part Fabio has been offered a great sum of money by a Russian Mafioso, who intends to marry Lorna to acquire citizenship as well. For this second marriage to be possible, Fabio has decided to kill Claudy, so that the authorities will not be suspicious of his intentions. Lora, on the other hand, understandably prefers the solution of divorce instead of having Claudy killed. Throughout her short engagement with him, she avoids any emotional involvement. She does not want him dead, something that she states quite emphatically to Fabio, but at the same time she does not want him to think that she is interested in him. Eventually, she realises that she cannot be completely detached and becomes more intimate. Claudy wants to kick his heroin habit and tries to win Lorna’s affections. In a diegetically unjustified scene Lorna takes off her clothes and makes love to him, something that will fundamentally change their relationship. Afraid of having his plan spoiled, Fabio make certain that Claudy will be given a heroin overdose. Claudy’s death influences Lorna’s behaviour radically, mainly because she intuits she is pregnant. Having learned that, Fabio tries to convince her to get an abortion, a prospect she denies. Finally his plan fails and his indignation causes him to have one of his thugs drive Lorna out of the country. Being aware that they will probably attempt to kill her, Lorna manages to escape from the driver, hitting him in the head with a rock. Running in the woods, she finds shelter in an unoccupied house, ensuring her child that she is ready to take any necessary risks to protect it.  The film never clarifies whether Lorna is pregnant or if this is just a fantasy that stems from feelings of guilt for Claudy’s death.

The formal approach towards the story employs simplicity and austerity, analogous to the one that we identified in the discussion of “Three Monkeys.”  Featuring a pseudo-documentary style, the film was shot on location and with predominantly natural lighting. These stylistic traits indicate ties of kinship with the Danish Dogme movement, an assertion that can be reinforced by the fact that the film avoids the employment of temporal alienation and non-diegetic music. Contrary to social problem films, “Le Silence de Lorna” does not moralise and exhibits a preference for demonstrating relationships of uncertainty instead of transparency. The restrictive narration does not accommodate the audience’s preference for a clear-cut plot line and as mentioned above there are diegetic patterns that are not made clear, obfuscating instead of explicating the story.

One of these contradictions can be identified in the love scene between Lorna and Claudy, which is not structured upon the rationale of narrative causality, that is, a chain of cause and effect series. In a preceding scene, we are shown Lorna hitting herself in the hospital, so as to make sure that a nurse may witness her wounds and draw to the conclusion that she is a victim of domestic violence, something that may hasten divorce procedures. Returning home, an argument between her and Claudy is followed by Lorna’s gesture of undressing herself and kissing him. Such a change in Lorna’s behaviour has been treated with suspicion by many critics. To understand it though, I suggest that we should not see this as a change in her psychological state of affairs, but as a gestural demonstration of a different attitude. This is the fundamental axiom of the Brechtian gestus, which aspires to show the different possibilities and patterns of conduct that a character might be presented with. The nub of this Brechtian technique is to make the notion of choice problematic and as an extension to politicise it, exposing the fact that the relationships and modes of attitude between bodies can reveal the social/political aspect of human relationships. To achieve this Brecht denies treating characters as unchangeable, arguing in favour of showing the individual as something subject to change. As Brecht says:

“It is too great a simplification if we make the actions fit the character and the character fit the actions: the inconsistencies which are to be found in the actions and characters of real people cannot be shown like this. The laws of motion of a society are not to be demonstrated by ‘perfect examples’, for ‘imperfection’ (inconsistency) is an essential part of motion and of the thing moved. It is only necessary- but absolutely necessary that there should be something approaching experimental conditions, i.e. that a counter-experiment should now and then be conceivable. Altogether this is a way of treating society as if all its actions were performed as experiments.” (Brecht 195).

Seen this way, Dardenne brothers build the narrative sequence of the film, trying to explore what is Lorna’s position in such a perplexed and complex situation. Lorna’s silence with regard to Fabio’s plan can be seen as a form of complicity. On the other hand, her mere affection towards Claudy is not sufficient to help him survive. The problem posed by the Dardennes is that there has to be some action taken on the part of the young immigrant. Which one is correct is something that is beyond the scope of the film. However, one thing is clearly manifested, Lorna can no longer stay passive and that is where the emphasis is placed on.

Significantly, the Belgian auteurs bring to the surface gender and immigration problems without eliciting over-simplistic feelings of empathy, but they manage to show oppression in a subtle way. Partially, this is achieved through their disinterestedness in conventional character portrayal and development. It is noticeable that there is not a single interaction between Lorna and other characters that is not based upon grounds of financial expediency, a choice that I suggest, places the film in a historical context. Her acquaintance with Fabio aims at getting her the right to work in a European country, something that will give him the ability to earn more money from her marriage with the Russian. Her sham marriage with Claudy constitutes the first step that will open the door to her dream of opening the snack bar with her boyfriend, with whom she shares a relationship which is strictly economic. Apparently, we are shown more moments of affection between Lorna and Claudy than between her and her boyfriend. In actuality, we only see them together when they visit places available for letting that can roof their snack-bar. Out of all these relationships, the only one that turns out to be authentic is the one between her and Claudy, the heroin addict who gets money to marry her. Again, this is a contradiction that cannot be interpreted following the diegetic laws of cause and effect.

To clarify this, I will resort once again to the theory and practice of Bertolt Brecht. Dana Polan in his discussion of Brecht’s practice rightly argues that Brecht’s theatre is a theatre of possibilities, with the view to revealing the changeability of history and the individuals. As he says: “The new theatre shows that formal arrangements of life can change. We can do things we never thought possible” (Polan 4). Polan’s comments are astute and clarify Brecht’s concept of juxtaposing two different world views in order to make the familiar strange. In this sense, Lorna’s risking of her financial interests by redefining her relationship with Claudy comprises an action of defamiliarisation, going against societal norms, namely economic prosperity. Lorna’s decision not to stay impassive exhibits the changeability of identity, a change that is not a psychological one, but a gestural, that is a change of praxis. This can explain the Dardennes’ penchant for a privileging of the bodily aspects of performance instead of the verbal ones and the flat recital of the lines on the part of their actors. Again, we can compare this to Robert Bresson’s cinema, which as Bazin explains is mainly concerned, not “with the psychology, but with the physiognomy of existence,” downplaying the laws of dramaturgy. Bazin elaborates on Bresson’s avoidance of tying the events according to a necessary order, putting forward the thesis that what interests him is the countenance, the conflict (Bazin 133). Similarly, “Le Silence de Lorna” presents the audience with Lorna’s dilemma, aspiring to provoke it to make the dialectical leap from the act of “recognising” familiar patterns of behaviour, to that of “seeing,” that is, exploring different possibilities that might be utopian in the literal sense of the word, namely absent.

Epilogue

Evidently, both films place their narratives in a historical context, operating under an aesthetic of invisibility. What this suggests is that narrative is not simply subordinated to the script. On the contrary, the visual elements clash with the textual ones producing contradictions that cannot be resolved by the diegesis. I am therefore inclined to suggest that this is the major political function of these very similar and very different films. They refuse to moralise, instead choosing to politicise. This politicisation is not achieved through a simple avant-gardist refusal of visual pleasure and an overt narrative dismissal. The simplicity that characterises the structuring of the mise-en-scène is a means of refusing to employ fixed narrative codes and an ambition on the part of the filmmakers to change the audience’s perceptual abilities with regard to the construction of meaning. From this perspective, we can explain the diegetic gaps and the plot incoherences, e.g. the ambiguity in the end of “Three Monkeys” and Lorna’s pregnancy, as an attempt to negate transparency. Such an approach reveals the dialectics of non-visibility, or as Adorno puts it, the true materialist longing to grasp reality through the absence of images (Jameson 119).

Works Cited:

Basin, Andre, ‘Le Journal d’un Curé de Campagne and the Stylistics of Robert Bresson’, in Andre Basin, What is Cinema, edited and translated by Hugh Gray. Berkeley: UCP, 1974, pp. 125-143.

Brecht, Bertolt, ‘A Short Organum for the Theatre’, in Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, edited and translated by John Willet. London: Methuen, 1964, pp. 179-205.

Byg Barton, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet. Berkeley: UCP, 1995.

Burch, Noel, Theory of Film Practice, translated by H.R. Lane. Princeton, New Jersey: PUP, 1981.

Jameson, Fredric, Late Marxism: Adorno, or the Persistence of the Dialectic London: Verso, 1990.

Polan, Dana , ‘Brecht and The Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema’, in Jump Cut, 1, 1974, available online at: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC17folder/BrechtPolan.html

Walsh, Martin, The Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema. London: BFI, 1981.