Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for last year’s Winter Sleep, the most recent of four films screening this summer as part of the Brattle’s Ceylan mini-retrospective. The other three are Climates (2006), Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), and tonight’s film, Three Monkeys (2008), in which the always—and, to some viewers, excruciatingly—artful Ceylan excels (while brooding, as ever, in his best Bergman mode) as a cinematic meteorologist, or else as a climatician, or, more simply, a watcher of the skies. The oneiric intensity of the image-making, equally foreboding and forlorn, attains a pitch of beauty and gravity that transforms this kitchen-sink drama-cum-noir, about a marriage buckling under pressure after the wealthy perpetrator of a hit-and-run hires an innocent man to do his time, into the stuff of tragic myth.

Three Monkeys
2008
dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan
109 min