Winter Sleep

Aydın is a retired stage actor who runs a small hotel carved into the rocks of Cappadocia. He is wealthy, cultured, and the landlord of half the village. He writes columns for a local paper about morality and tradition, and believes he is a good man. With him live his much younger wife Nihal, who has her own charity work and her own frustration, and his recently divorced sister Necla, who has nothing to do but argue. Then a boy throws a stone at Aydın's car, and with the arrival of winter, all the resentments that have been sleeping wake up.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's film is more than three hours long and consists largely of conversations in warm, lamp-lit rooms while the snow falls outside. It sounds heavy, and it is demanding. But the dialogues, inspired by Chekhov, are brilliant: long, intelligent, cruel arguments in which characters slowly strip each other bare. Haluk Bilginer is superb as Aydın, a man whose good manners hide a quiet, suffocating need for control.

It is a film about power, money and self-deception, about how comfortable people justify their comfort, and about the poor tenants whose pride they cannot understand. The scene with the money and the fire is unforgettable. It won the Palme d'Or. Slow, rigorous and devastating. Give it the time, and it will stay with you.