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Title: Clouds of May (1999)
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| Cast overview: | |||
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Emin Ceylan | ... | Emin, Muzzafer's father (as M. Emin Ceylan) |
| Muzaffer Özdemir | ... | Muzaffer, the movie-maker | |
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Fatma Ceylan | ... | Fatma, Muzaffer's mother |
| Mehmet Emin Toprak | ... | Saffet (as M. Emin Toprak) | |
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Muhammad Zimbaoglu | ... | Ali |
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Sadik Incesu | ... | Sadik |
This is a movie within movie, which is almost recursive, i.e., the movie inside looks like director Ceylan's previous movie, Kasaba. It is about the movie director, Muzaffer, going back to his hometown to make a movie using a cast of local people. While Muzaffer is around, his mother complains about simple health problems, his father is in a legal fight against the government for his land, his cousin gets out of his job to help Muzaffer who promises him to find a job in Istanbul, and his little cousin Ali tries to carry an egg in his pocket for 40 days so that he'll get the watch of his dreams. In the meantime, they get to form the cast for Muzaffer's movie as well. Written by zuluf
This has the same actors as Uzak, playing very similar characters. It also has the Ceylan's parents in leading roles - playing a film director's parents. It's fairly self-indulgent - there can be no doubt that Ceylan only knows one thing, and that he is filming it here - but that's precisely the reason to come to Ceylan: to get away from the commercial stuff, to get some glimpses of ordinary people more or less struggling with their lives.
This film has few pretensions, only aiming to show us various people from small-town Turkey, each with their own petty preoccupations. It takes its time, but when it's hot and the sun is dappled by leaves against the wall, why rush? These things are worth capturing for their own sake, because times and places change, people die and disappear - and the world is fascinating despite our weariness. The message is implicit in the very making of the film, which is a record of the making of a film.
This kind of thoughtful, gently sentimental film-making surely owes a lot to Kiarostami and the Iranians. Ceylan is halfway between that and Tarkovsky, just as he is geographically. Clouds of May is not something you need to see - Uzak was a better distillation of what he has to offer in terms of original cinema - but it leaves an impression of things you feel you ought to have more time for, and which are perhaps among the most important things.