Three Monkeys (Uc Maymun) (2008)Three Monkeys (2008) is Turkey’s submission for an Oscar in the Foreign-Language Film category. Obviously, the Turks think it is excellent. The film is a professional work with top-notch cinematography, a sparsely sophisticated sound track, and impeccable acting. But once the film makers decided to create a heavy drama about the stresses, strains, and disintegration of a working-class Istanbul family, they had three major challenges to meet to keep us riveted, and they met the challenges with mixed results.
The three monkeys are a husband who is the driver for an aspiring politician, a wife who works in a commercial kitchen, and their post-high-school son who cannot pass the national university entrance exams. Each of them in turn makes a major “stupid” decision at great cost to their own psychological health and to family unity. How are we to care for three people making reprehensible and self-destructive decisions? The film does little to engage our concern. It might have shown us the family in happier times, but instead it begins with crisis. It might have made them victims of circumstance, and this is hinted at but not developed because, as the movie tries to point out, they delude themselves if they think their circumstances forced their hand. The husband does not really need the money he agrees to go to prison for: The family is getting along reasonably well. The wife does not need to have an affair while he is in prison, although it probably guaranteed that the family got the money. The son did not have to take the drastic action he did—it was entirely his free choice. The film might have generated sympathy for the family by having other characters say nice things about them, but there are almost no other characters. The film focuses relentlessly on the three monkeys.
In focusing on the family, the film tries to portray their inner thoughts and feelings and runs into the age-old problem of how to use a medium that is action—motion pictures, move-ies—to portray inner states. Excellent acting helps. When, for example, the son discovers his mother’s affair and then visits his father in prison, the young man says there is nothing wrong but the subtle downward tilt of his head and his slightly evasive eyes engender doubt in his father. Top-rate cinematography also helps. Characters are often shot as almost-silhouettes as the camera focuses on the Bosporus or something else in the background. This has an unsettling effect, an approximation of what the character is feeling. The shots also vary from intense close-ups to wide-angle takes that make the characters inferior to the environment. For instance, when we see the wife at work, she is initially dwarfed by cooking tables and pots and pans. And when she phones, in vain, to find her son a job, she is a relatively small figure at the end of a long hallway. But the bottom line is, when you have moving pictures of things that don’t move, the audience spends a lot of time looking at faces and wondering what the people are thinking and feeling.
The film meets its third major challenge much more successfully. After viewers have stuck with three difficult-to-like characters and tried to figure out what they were thinking and feeling, there has to be a pay off, and Three Monkeys has an effective ending. I don’t want to give away the ending, but I will say that the husband, who seems to have learned little from his ordeal, tries to strike a deal with a poor, minor character. Does the young man accept the deal? Should he? What would you do? The low-key and ambiguous ending is forcefully thought-provoking.