Reviews

As a kind of cultural globalization takes over world cinema, one should be grateful for directors such as the Hungarian Béla Tarr, the Romanian Cristian Mungiu, the Iranians Abbas Kiarostami and Bahman Ghobadi and the Turkish Nuri Bilge Ceylan who keep alive a personal, regional and stylistically individual form of film-making. Their work is never likely to become widely popular at home or abroad, but they're beacons of hope for the future of a troubled art.

A photographer by profession, Ceylan turned to film-making in the mid-90s and works largely with non-professional actors and small budgets. He belongs in the tradition of Tarkovsky, Bergman, Antonioni, Angelopoulos and other masters that seemed in the 60s and 70s to be on the point of becoming a new or, at least, parallel mainstream but has now been marginalised. His new film, The Three Monkeys, like its two predecessors, won a major award at Cannes, in this case the prize for best director, and it begins with that familiar dramatic device for the creation of tension, guilt and dangerous consequences - the hit-and-run accident.

Here, a man kills a pedestrian at night on a country road. It transpires that he is a politician, Servet, and in order for the event not to affect a forthcoming election he bribes his driver Eyüp, who wasn't with him on this occasion, to take the rap. He'll go on getting paid during his nine-month sentence and at the end will receive a decent pay-off.

The title is a reference to the Sino-Japanese image of the three wise monkeys who see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, suggesting this film is a moral fable about the consequences of evasion, corruption and suppression. Servet thinks he's doing what's best for his party and the country: he's a supporter of Prime Minister Erdogan and the occasion is the 2007 general election that ended in a landslide victory. Eyüp believes he's acting like a good servant, but, more important, he's getting the money that will get a better home for his handsome wife Hacer and provide for the education of his teenage son Ismail.

Nothing good comes of these actions. One way and another, everyone's life is affected, indeed in some measure destroyed, but like much else in the film the judgments are left to the viewer. Are we dealing with national problems of widespread social corruption, with the weaknesses of a set of individuals or the operation of a malignant fate of a kind that stalks us all? From the start, Ceylan draws us into the very narrative fabric. In the opening scene, using silence, long takes, available light and dramatic compositions, he makes us ask questions about what we are seeing. Who is this man? What has he done? How will he react? There are long gaps in time between individual sequences and seemingly important facts are never made plain.

Ismail comes home with a badly cut hand and a bruised face, but he never reveals to his mother, or to us, whether these wounds came from brawling or from political demonstrations. They have the effect, however, of persuading her to visit the politician and seek an advance on the bribe to buy a car for the boy. This in turn leads to an affair, which is only discovered when Ismail returns home early to find his mother making love to Servet. When Eyüp emerges from jail, he's furious about the car and his suspicions over his wife's infidelity seem confirmed by a message on her cell phone. For most of the film, the images are desaturated, but during the scene of reunion, Hacer is wearing a red slip, which both excites her husband and drives him to violence.

In the family's background is the death of another son, some 15 years earlier, and his father and surviving brother are haunted by visions of this loss. In the future lies a repetition of the incident that launches the film, only here the conspiracy is initiated by Eyüp. Though perhaps not quite as good as Climates, Ceylan's last picture, this is a film of formidable power that sticks in the mind.

Two sequences in particular stand out. In one, the politician rejects the obsessed Hacer with great brutality, but the camera is placed nearly 50 yards away across a field. In the other, the film's closing long shot, the husband stands on the balcony of their ramshackle apartment block to the south of Istanbul, his back to the camera, looking out over the Sea of Marmara as an electric storm begins to stir.

Where would Hollywood have been without Fredric March as Robert Browning or Dennis Price as Lord Byron, famous lovers in their day? Even an actor as normally straitlaced as Michael Redgrave once brought some moody charm to a portrayal of W.B. Yeats. Writers' lives are an endless source of inspiration.

But of all poets it was Dylan Thomas, the roistering, free-loving Welshman who enjoyed a pint or two (and drank himself to death in New York at the age of 39), who was closest in spirit to the film industry. During World War II, he produced scripts for British propaganda documentaries. He even wrote the screenplay of a vapid melodrama called The Three Weird Sisters, in which three old maids in a Welsh village plot the murder of their rich half-brother. All that is now forgiven.

In John Maybury's The Edge of Love, Thomas is played by the Welsh actor Matthew Rhys. It's not a full-scale biopic. The film covers four years in the poet's life during World War II, when he lived with two women: his wife Caitlin (Sienna Miller) and a former lover Vera Phillips (Keira Knightley), whom he met again by chance during the war. It seems he loved them both. The relationship of these extraordinary women -- to Thomas and to each other -- is at the heart of Maybury's absorbing film.

How it came to be made is a story almost as remarkable as that of the lovers themselves. Rebekah Gilbertson, the film's producer, is the granddaughter of Vera Phillips and William Killick. William, a war hero (played in the film by Cillian Murphy), married Vera while she was still in love with the poet. Gilbertson was inspired to make the film when she discovered a book about her grandparents, Dylan Thomas: A Farm, Two Mansions and Bungalow, by David Thomas, describing their tangled lives. Sharman Macdonald, who wrote the screenplay, is the mother of Knightley. The part requires Knightley to sing, and her mother included songs especially for her. Surely no film with such felicitous family connections deserves to do other than succeed.

We begin in London during the Blitz. Bombs are falling, sirens are wailing, and Phillips is singing to sheltering crowds in an underground Tube station. In a pub, by chance, she meets Thomas and discovers after all these years that he has a wife and child. Phillips and Caitlin form a friendship untroubled by jealousy or rancour and are soon sharing beds and bathtubs, listening to Thomas read his poems, exchanging intimate secrets and smoking their heads off, as everyone did in wartime. Caitlin turns out to be more experienced in the ways of the world ("My first was Augustus John, he seduced me when I was 15"). But it's the refined and soulful Phillips who stirs Thomas's deepest responses and eventually succumbs to his charms. In the meantime, she has reluctantly married Killick, who has seen her in the Tube station and been instantly captivated by her beauty (if not her singing).

It is an intense and strangely beautiful film, though Thomas himself may be its least impressive character. He is best remembered for Under Milk Wood, his verse radio play about a day in the life of the mythical Welsh village of Llareggub, whose name spelt backwards was not something polite English teachers drew attention to. I once had a vinyl recording of Richard Burton reading the poem (he appeared in a film of Under Milk Wood in 1971), and I've never forgotten the creamy, seductive quality of his voice. The legendary charisma, the magnetism of the man, is something I missed in Rhys's performance. Thomas comes across as a strangely pallid, even secondary, figure compared with the women in his life.

In his previous film, Love Is the Devil, Maybury explored the turbulent life of painter Francis Bacon and his sadomasochistic relationship with his lover and model, George Dyer. The Edge of Love seems to me a richer and more satisfying film. If you ask what insights it offers into the springs of Thomas's creative inspiration, I would have to say Llareggub. But as an insight into his egotism, his smouldering moods and his general indifference to the feelings of others, it is wonderfully sad and revealing.

Thomas had a good war, boozing and writing while other men (including Killick) were being traumatised by the horrors of battle. In one scene near the end, Thomas's behaviour towards his friends seems unforgivably callous. But this is not, after all, Thomas's film. Murphy gives us a magnificent study in doomed passion and the emotional debilitation of war. Miller is charming and pathetic as the wife. And Knightley looks almost too exquisitely delicate to be real (as she did in Pride and Prejudice). But this is probably her finest performance. And in every respect the film is worthy of her.

Michal (Boguslaw Linda) is a busy man. He works in movie industry, travels and he doesn't have much time for his family. But when the crisis comes, he rises to the occasion and fights for his daughter. Crisis in, at first sight, good family shows how much he loves both his wife and daughter but has to give up on one of them.

Very good tale of dad-daughter love with nice acting. Something for everyone, really good movie which relates to discrimination of fathers in courts when it comes to assign care of a child which is actually pretty common (still) problem in Poland. There's a belief that no matter how women is bad and unprepared for raising a child, she should do so, just because she is a mother. As one of the characters in movie says: "Everywhere in the world mothers raise their kids, but only in Poland they get monuments for that".