Turkish drama wins top prize at Cannes fest

AFP/Reuters/Cannes Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan has won the Palme d’Or top prize at the Cannes Film Festival for Winter Sleep, a slow-burn domestic drama that mesmerised audiences despite its more than three-hour length.Jury president Jane Campion, the New Zealand filmmaker, handed over the trophy to Ceylan, who beat out 17 other contenders including David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard and the Oscar-winning director of The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius, to claim top honours.It was the first triumph at the world’s biggest cinema showcase for Turkey since 1982, when Yol by Yilmaz Guney shared the gong with Missing by Costa Gavras.Ceylan dedicated the prize to the Turkish youth “who lost their lives” in violent anti-government protests that have rocked Turkey over the last year.He had already won other awards at Cannes for his previous films Uzak, Climates, Three Monkeys, and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.Bookies had tipped Winter Sleep even before its screening as the favourite to capture the award, based on his track record and a sense that he was due.Set in Turkey’s stunning Cappadocia region, Winter Sleep drew rave reviews after its red-carpet premiere and a lengthy standing ovation.The film stars Haluk Bilginer, known to international audiences from the long-running British soap opera EastEnders, as a wealthy retired actor living with his much younger wife (the stunning Melisa Sozen) and his recently divorced sister (popular comic actress Demet Akbag).Based on short stories by Anton Chekhov, their tense family triangle plays out in a quaint hotel serving hikers and motocross enthusiasts drawn to the rugged region.Aydin, the husband, acts like the benevolent monarch of his remote community, dispensing charity and, when he sees fit, harsh discipline to the villagers.He sees himself, however, as a champion of enlightened reason in conservative Muslim Anatolia, and a guardian of Turkey’s rich cultural tradition.Their intricately pitched, often remarkably lengthy dialogues, written by Ceylan and his wife Ebru, dig deep and drew comparisons to Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, a master of moral questioning and the personal drama writ large.Ebru Ceylan admitted to reporters at the festival that the writing process with her husband was “very intense – we often had quite serious quarrels”.Nuri Bilge Ceylan expressed “great surprise” in winning the prize in a historic year for the industry in Turkey.He pointed out that this year was the 100th anniversary of Turkish cinema, adding it was a great “coincidence”.Meanwhile, Julianne Moore won the best actress prize for her role as a shallow starlet in Cronenberg’s biting Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars.In the film, the 53-year-old redhead plays an ageing actress feeling increasingly sidelined by an industry obsessed with youth.When the young son of a rival actress for new film role is killed in a freak drowning accident, Moore does a dance of joy that remained one of the enduring shocks of this year’s festival.“Vive Los Angeles, Vive David Cronenberg, vive Julie Moore et vive la France,” the film’s screenwriter, Bruce Wagner, said as he picked up the trophy for Moore, who was not in Cannes.Moore has played everything from a porn star to an FBI agent over a two-decade big screen career that has already brought four Oscar nominations, two Golden Globes and a Primetime Emmy to her name.Her best-known films include 1998’s The Big Lebowski, Crazy Stupid Love (2011) as well as The Hours and Far From Heaven, both from 2002.Those last two helped her join the elite club of actors to score two Oscar nominations for different films in the same year.She also scored Academy Award nods for Boogie Nights (1997) and The End of the Affair (1999).Moore won a Golden Globe and an Emmy for portraying Sarah Palin in 2012’s Game Change, about Republican John McCain’s doomed 2008 White House run with the former Alaska governor as his gaffe-prone running mate.British actor Timothy Spall claimed the best actor prize at the film festival for his role in a lush historical portrait of painter JMW Turner, by director Mike Leigh.Mr Turner stars the 57-year-old Spall, credited with blazing a trail for modern art of the time, in a grunting, snorting, spitting, womanising, warts-and-all performance that critics hailed as riveting.“I am trying to hold back my tears,” an emotional Spall told the audience after receiving the prize, lauding his decades of collaboration with Leigh.One of Britain’s best-regarded character actors, and better known abroad for a recurring role as Peter Pettigrew in the Harry Potter movies, Spall is credited with a gift for invoking empathy with otherwise unlovable protagonists.For his role as Turner, Spall practised painting for two years before starting to film with Leigh and said his extensive research revealed the British artist to be “a man of mystery”.The film festival’s best director award went to Bennett Miller, who scooped up the award for Foxcatcher, a film based on the real-life murder of an Olympic wrestler by multi-millionaire John du Pont.The 47-year-old’s third feature film had critics raving and viewers were left particularly stunned by Steve Carell, whose performance as the deranged, sinister du Pont marked a complete turnaround from his previous funny man roles.The film also stars Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo as Mark and Dave Schultz, two wrestling-champion brothers.Miller has only made three feature films, but already he is a regular at international award ceremonies.He directed his childhood friend Philip Seymour Hoffman to Oscar glory with Capote, his 2005 biopic of author and playwright Truman Capote.Hoffman also won a BAFTA and Golden Globe for his performance.Then came Moneyball, a 2011 biographical baseball drama which also got several award nominations.Miller took eight years to prepare Foxcatcher, researching the story by meeting those who knew the two brothers.Le Meraviglie (The Wonders) by Italian director Alice Rohrwacher took the second place prize for a coming-of-age story set in the Tuscan countryside as a family tries to eke out a bohemian life making honey.Twenty-five-year-old Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s film Mommy shared the third-place prize with octogenarian French director Jean-Luc Godard’s Adieu au Langage (Goodbye to Language).Leviathan by Russia’s Andrei Zvyagintsev took the prize for best screenplay.