Winter Sleep was the favorite to win Cannes before anyone had even seen it

Winter Sleep (2014)

“This is a great surprise for me,” declared Nuri Bilge Ceylan at the end of the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, when Jane Campion revealed that her jury was handing his latest film, Winter Sleep, highest honors. Was this false modesty or does the Turkish director—now a five-time prizewinner at Cannes—ignore his own press? Smart money was always on Ceylan: From the moment it was announced that this darling of the fest was returning to the French Riviera with a three-and-a-half-hour magnum opus, oddsmakers were calling it the one to beat. Frontrunner status never passed to a different movie, even after Winter Sleep actually screened, inspiring a mixed reaction among the critics in attendance. Prognosticators predicted possible upsets, but in the end, the Palme D’Or went to the movie everyone immediately assumed it would go to. How dully expected.

I wasn’t there to see Ceylan graciously accept the award he was apparently preordained to receive. But I was there, on the third day of my first Cannes, for the packed premiere of his film. Winter Sleep was the longest but not the best of the 18 movies that competed for the Palme this May—a talky, chilly drama, stretched without proper reason across a mammoth timeframe. The film is expertly acted, beautifully filmed, and often sharply written. It’s also ungainly, with a plot that keeps creeping along, at least an hour past its suitable endpoint. Ceylan, a photographer who got into moviemaking in the mid-’90s, has increased the size and scope of his canvas with each new movie, his ambitions ballooning with his acclaim. But bigger isn’t always better: While Campion claimed at the awards ceremony that she “could have happily stayed [in the movie] for another couple of hours,” she was representing what must be seen as a minority opinion. The film, which could hit U.S. theaters as early as the end of the year, might send viewers spiraling into… well, see the second word of its title.

Even more so than usual, this year’s Cannes lineup was heavy on stories of class conflict, privilege (or lack thereof), and power. Two biopics—Bertrand Bonello’s shallow Saint Laurent and Mike Leigh’s lively Mr. Turner—each devoted more than two-and-a-half hours to the lifestyles of their rich and famous subjects, while David Cronenberg weirded up ancient anti-Hollywood clichés in the facile Maps To The Stars. Every day seemed to bring a different vision of toxic entitlement: There was Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher, which cast Steve Carrell as an aristocratic sociopath, and Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan, the quasi-Biblical saga of a fat-cat mayor putting the squeeze on one unlucky family. The Dardennes, two-time Palme winners who have always made films about the marginalized, returned to the festival with Two Days, One Night, a disarming tale of working-class perseverance. And Wild Tales, a zany Argentinian anthology, devoted the majority of its black comic vignettes to social unrest—pitting a sports-car-driving yuppie against an angry trucker, a disgruntled demolitionist against an uncaring bureaucracy, and so forth. To attend the festival was to be constantly reminded that there are haves and have-nots in this world.

At first glance, class appears to be the chief subject of Winter Sleep, too. Ceylan might well have recycled the title of his previous film, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia: The setting, again, is Asia Minor, and there’s a comparably mythic quality to the storytelling. Carved into the Turkish countryside is a rural hotel, its individual units spread across the region’s gorgeous topography. The establishment is owned and operated by a wealthy windbag named Aydin (Haluk Bilginer), who lives a life of relative luxury and minor celebrity, collecting rent checks from the mostly impoverished tenants of his hotel. A retired actor, he toils away on a non-fiction book about Turkish theater and pens a scathing opinion column for the local newspaper, using the platform to take potshots at his neighbors. He fancies himself a benevolent cultural diplomat, imparting wisdom upon a community he neglects. He is despicable, but fascinatingly so.

The plot commences with a literal thrown stone; the son of a tenant hurls it at the windshield of Aydin’s car, avenging the humiliation his drunkard dad, Ismail (Nejat Isler), has suffered at the hands of the landlord’s loan sharks. Moments later, Aydin’s driver (Ayberk Pekcan) is demanding compensation from Ismail, the two nearly coming to blows. Notably, Aydin hangs back during this confrontation, allowing his hired help to do his dirty work. This is the first sign of the man’s cowardice, and Winter Sleep appears for a while to be building, slowly but surely, to an explosion of class warfare—a violent reckoning for Aydin, a self-described “king” whose “subjects” have had enough.

But Ceylan, an unconventional dramatist, rarely delivers the kind of satisfying catharsis his plots initially seem to promise: Anatolia is an existential police procedural that blatantly forgoes closure, while Three Monkeys is essentially a noir that perversely keeps its genre elements—murder, adultery, etc.—off camera. Winter Sleep similarly bucks expectation, in this case by circumventing the revenge-of-the-underclass narrative it seems to be unspooling. There is a kind of comeuppance in store for Aydin, though it comes not from the locals, but from his inner circle of loved ones—his divorced sister, Necla (Demet Akbag), who grows weary of her brother’s pompous musings, and his much younger wife, Nihal (Melisa Sözen), whose charity work the man condescendingly dismisses. These two women decide, separately but almost simultaneously, to knock their boorish benefactor down a few notches. Ceylan seems to be arguing that a person like Aydin can only be wounded by someone of his own social stature. (For all his boiling contempt, Ismail is as powerless to enact revenge as he is to turn his own life around.)