Three Monkeys

Three Monkeys – Patterned after American film noir, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s 2008 Three Monkeys dissects a pathology that seems specific to modern Turkey, but which has much larger, and more universal, implications. What happens when one man can pay someone else to suffer for his crimes? In Three Monkeys, a politician standing for re-election kills someone in a hit-and-run accident. The politician, with a surprising ease, persuades his chauffeur to take the rap for the killing and serve a nine-month jail sentence. During his imprisonment, the chauffeur’s family receives his salary, together with a promise for a lump-sum payment when the man is released. In an American film, this plot would segue into blackmail. The Turkish picture takes a different angle – the chauffeur’s family is humiliated by the fact that the paterfamilias has agreed to accept blame for the smarmy politicians misdeed (the guy doesn’t even win re-election). The mere fact that the chauffeur is willing to go to prison for a wage is a disgrace that corrodes the impoverished already fragile, family. Hoping for an advance on the lump sum, the chauffeur’s wife visits the politician and is seduced by him. The son is beaten up by schoolmates, probably because he defended his father’s honor – an “honor” that he (and the viewer) knows to be spurious. The son spies on his mother’s tryst with the corrupt politician and more misery ensues. Ultimately, there is, as one expects, a murder. (The reason that the plot doesn’t turn on blackmail is sinister – everyone probably knows that the politician is guilty of the crime, but it doesn’t matter so long as someone is in jail for hit and run.) Ceylan is one of the greatest of all directors active today. Three Monkeys has a tremendous cast and is brilliantly, if very elliptically, made – we don’t see any of the major incidents in the plot: everything is suggested and, therefore, much more resonant in the imagination. Ceylan enlists us in constructing the story. The camerawork and editing is extraordinarily inventive and expressive – every shot is precisely staged for maximum emotional effect. Much of the picture turns on people watching one another and Ceylan is fantastically inventive in staging these scenes. Something terrible has happened in this family even before the filmed story begins. The father accepts blame for the politician’s misdeed because he is feels himself already guilty . Apparently, the youngest son in the family has died, possibly by drowning and the survivors are unbalanced by that loss, all suffused with guilt, and, therefore, complicit in the monstrous scheme hatched by the politician. Ceylan’s imagery of supernatural visits from the dead boy is startling, even, terrifying, and demonstrates that mother, father, and surviving son – the three monkeys that hear, see, and do no evil – are vulnerable to precisely the kind of manipulation practiced by the burly “strong-man” politician. The lonely and beautiful mother is not merely seduced by the politician but falls in love with him – her abject pleading, which is hard to watch, triggers the film’s grim climax. (Ebru Ceylan, the director’s glamorous wife, plays this part superbly – in some shots, she looks seductive and girlish; in other images, she seems hopelessly haggard, old and weary – she is also credited as a co-writer of the script). Ceylan makes evocative use of his Istanbul settings – the family lives in what appears to be a fragment of the city’s ancient wall, a structure that is so unbelievably configured that, when you see it at first, you think it is some kind of joke or trick of visual perspective. The Dardanelles straits, railroad trains, traffic running on the freeway beneath the crumbling city walls are all used to create an exceptionally vivid milieu in which the action takes place – events coherently imagined across a symbolic space. I fear that the plot has some sort of parable significance to Turks – the politician is apparently unseated in the election that brought prime minister Recip Erdogen to power and in extremis the chauffeur turns to two opposing aspects of Turkish ideology: first, we see him in an all-male tea house under a huge portrait of Ataturk; then, he goes to mosque where others pray while he silently watches. There is probably an important political subtext in the picture apparent to Turks but, mostly, invisible to an American audience.