The story line for “Three Monkeys” might have been ripped from a hard-boiled novel of the “Double Indemnity” school. But it doesn’t play that way.
A wealthy politician, currently a candidate for office, runs someone down in a car accident. He pays his chauffeur to take the rap and serve a year in jail. The imprisoned man’s wife then begins an affair with the politician, much to the murderous fury of her grown son.
It could be a film noir, but that’s not what Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is making. His approach puts an intense concentration on mood, character and place. As he has said of his style, “If I show too much action, that risks eclipsing the other moments of the film.”
If the title suggests the proverb about “See no evil,” etc., then the film is all about the consequences of lying. The one big lie — that the politician (Ercan Kesal) wasn’t driving the car — is responsible for a series of other lies, for poisoning the well from which all these characters drink.
The wife (Hatice Aslan) is worn down by life, but flattered by the politician’s attention; her son (Ahmet Rifat Sungar) has his own selfish motives for wanting the payoff; and the chauffeur (Yavuz Bingol) has a reason, before the film is over, to engineer his own responsibility-shifting.
The movie never says anything about the politics of the candidate. But because today’s politics sometimes seem to have become the art of the Big Lie, it hardly matters — his approach to the scandal indicates his philosophy. The buck doesn’t stop here. Maybe the buck doesn’t stop at all anymore.
Ceylan’s previous film was the even more effective “Climates.” In this one, he traps the characters in his careful compositions, and pours a yellowish light over most scenes, as though the film stock were as affected as the lives of the people.
By the way, if you’re a sucker for a good opening sequence, this movie delivers a humdinger: the car accident. True to his principles, Ceylan actually filmed the accident, but then cut most of it out of the film. He just shows the darkness of a forest road, a pair of lights disappearing in the night, and a faint thump. Don’t miss the beginning of this one.
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