Exploring the effects of a family's dealings with an underhanded politician, this crime drama avoids showing the violent outcomes of its characters' misdeeds, resulting in a lingeringly potent film.
Exploring the effects of a family's dealings with an underhanded politician, this crime drama avoids showing the violent outcomes of its characters' misdeeds, resulting in a lingeringly potent film.
Set in the areas of Istanbul rarely visited by foreigners, director Nuri Bilge Ceylan's strange detective story traces the journey of a family that is suddenly dislocated when minor shortcomings explode into exorbitant deceptions. Now their only hope of remaining together is to cover up the truth, but can ignoring the hardships and responsibilities that would be impossible to endure ever really invalidate the existence of the truth? ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
With Three Monkeys, Nuri Bilge Ceylan trains his cool, detached sensibility on a ripe and pulpy melodrama that might have originated in a James M. Cain novel.
Three Monkeys proves again that [Nuri Bilge] Ceylan has the eye of an artist, with a soul to match. If only his storytelling skills were equally represented.
Ceylan finds moments of stunning visual composition and his cast truly delivers, so art-house audiences will more than likely be satisfied by Three Monkeys, even if it's not a knockout punch.
Tells an old-fashioned, melodramatic story, but director Nuri Bilge Ceylan does so vividly. . . A moral morass is a bit overwrought, but is revealed through visual poetry.
Stylish cinematography along with decent performances don't compensate for an often tedious plot that lacks any real tension, imagination or palpable poignancy.
Director Ceylan uses neo-Antonioni techniques for a plot which calls much more for Billy Wilder or the Coen brothers. Cinematography can only go so far. In the final analysis, you need dialog, plot and character development for a good movie. "Three Monkey
If you're looking for an adultery- and revenge-fueled family melodrama so subdued that it keeps a hit-and-run fatality, cuckoldry, and murder entirely off screen, Three Monkeys is your movie and Nuri Bilge Ceylan your not-so-genre-inclined auteur.
Not as intense as 'Climates' but still filmed with an exquisite painterly eye. The routine plot is shaken alive by two striking scenes which left me gasping and add a star to the score alone - I won't spoil the surprise by saying any more.
July 14, 2009
Gordon A
Super Reviewer
In "Three Monkeys," Servet(Ercan Kesal) is a politician who has just been involved in an apparent hit and run. Fearing the effect this could have on his upcoming election, he persuades his driver Eyup(Yavuz Bingol) to take the heat and a six month sentence. In exchange, he will continue receiving his salary and get a
lump sum at the end of his sentence. Meanwhile, Eyup's grown son Ismail(Rifat Sungar) cannot bring himself to move far from the couch. Upon learning that Ismail needs a car for a promising job, his mother Hacer(Hatice Aslan) goes to Servet to ask for an advance on the lump sum. While at least intriguing enough to let the audience draw their own conclusions, "Three Monkeys" is also very much dramatically inert in trying to answer the eternal question of how much you can tell about a person from her ring tone. Otherwise, this is a tale of loss, almost unbearably so, since it has been simmering for years and has sucked the life out of a household which is represented by the desaturated color scheme. However, there is the occasional sign of life and the color red makes a welcome appearance in a key scene.
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