-By Maria Garcia

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Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s characters in Three Monkeys, Eyüp (Yavuz Bingöl), his wife Hacer (Hatice Aslan) and their teenage son Ismail (Ahmet Rifat Sungar), are embroiled in a conflict that arises from some inner struggle, and in this sense they are dramatic characters. Paralyzed by a loss the family suffered many years ago, all three are at a breaking point. At the outset, we imagine a plot that will veer toward violence and then resolution or, at the very least, one that explains these characters’ pathos—but in Three Monkeys, neither drama nor redemption is close at hand. If they were, we would be unable to peer into the troubled souls of these protagonists, and it is Ceylan’s intention to have us do nothing but that.

The movie opens with a man driving at night along a very dark and narrow road. He’s tired, and soon there is an accident. The man is Eyüp’s boss, a politician in the midst of a campaign. Eyüp, who is his driver, agrees to take the blame for the accident in exchange for money. It means spending six months in jail, months during which Hacer and Ismail, free from Eyüp’s domineering presence, indulge in whatever relieves their feelings of emptiness. Lust, obsession and infidelity follow, but mostly off-camera. Ismail, accustomed to his parents’ emotional abandonment, silently absorbs their sins, and dreams of a car, a getaway of sorts.

In a cinematic style that most resembles Robert Bresson, Ceylan ( Climates) minimizes every dramatic element, including sound. In fact, sound is never used to support the image: Ambient sounds in Three Monkeys often emanate from another environment or another shot. Sounds are connected to inner states, rather than to location; for instance, the impossibly loud, jarring passage of the train as Hacer walks home, after having been driven there by the politician, marks an explosive change in her. Ceylan eschews music, too, because it would add an unnecessary element. The one exception is Hacer’s cell-phone ring. In the aesthetic of the film, that music marks her as out of control, and indeed her feelings of emptiness are soon replaced by obsession.

Ceylan also dispenses with point-of-view: No one protagonist prevails. Acting, in the traditional sense of the word, is antithetical: Bresson wrote that a director must “tighten the meshing” so that the actor “cannot any longer not be him,” and “do nothing that is not useful.” For Ceylan and all Transcendentalist filmmakers, the motions and emotions of the actors must be organic and purposeful, in order for us to see what they are made of.
Three Monkeys, named for the monkeys who “tell” no evil—sins are not divulged—is a brilliant conceit in which the Turkish filmmaker identifies a spiritual and psychological pattern that deadens the soul. If that sounds esoteric, it is: This is much more than an “art” film. Like Bresson’s movies, Three Monkeys is an archetype of the cinematic form in which the elements are stripped to their essences so that what remains is immaterial—as insubstantial as cinema can be. Ceylan even subsumes the image. The film, shot in HD, is dark, and nearly colorless. What happens in Three Monkeys is what happens in life, which is very unlike drama: People in psychic pain flail, and attack a convenient target, rather than getting to the root of their suffering.

Sometimes, not often, innocence appears in the spiritual abyss, as it did in the past for Eyüp, Hacer and Ismail. Now, it’s an apparition, stalking the eerie outcrop they call home, a building which overlooks train tracks and then the sea. Whether the loss of that innocence is the cause of this family’s grief and acrimony, or the apparition is all that is left of their souls, is unclear, but for Ceylan, innocence needs no definition. What must be depicted is the state of soullessness which arises when we make so many wrong-headed or wrong-hearted decisions that we lose ourselves, and in our pain destroy other souls in our wake. In that condition, neither the trains nor the sea offer escape—only Bressonian redemption, which Hacer seeks when she climbs the wall of the terrace as a train roars by below her.