Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (NR)
Running Time:150 min Directed by: Nuri Bilge Ceylan Written by:Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kesal Starring: Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan and Taner Birsel
Mobster’s Rating:
Although the title summons a vibe of the mythic, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is more a stately character study than some sort of moody epic in the Sergio Leone vein. A police procedural unfolds in the dimming twilight of an Anatolian countryside with a group of archetypical men—a police commissioner, a physician, a lawyer and a prisoner– searching for a woman’s body. As the day fades and darkness creeps in, the men begin to reveal secrets of their own that change the nature of their interactions. Although it doesn’t play out like the kind of potboiler audiences may expect from the set-up, Ceylan’s film is an exquisite example of detective fiction where the viewer, not the characters, studies the clues, puts the pieces together, and draws conclusions from the evidence.
I may have gotten myself in trouble, dropping the term ‘detective’ in there. Anatolia may feature a dead body, a couple of suspects, and a search party looking for a missing person, but it isn’t driven by these elements; they don’t add up into a thriller or a potent drama, and if anything they merely serve to to provide a context for the conversations and interactions of the characters. A morality play in three segments, Anatolia is moody and excruciatingly paced, unfolding over the course of two and a half hours.
Suspense is built not from solving the mystery of the murder or the location of the body, but in sorting through Ceylan’s allegorical characters and their individual concepts of truth—in fact, the biggest enigma is discovering which of them is the protagonist. The film is an observation, so carefully rendered that it avoids sloppy diversions into melodrama or deviations into thriller. The details of the conversations mount, creating portraits of the doctor, the commissioner, the prosecutor and the alleged murderer. Ceylan doesn’t give us clarity but instead obscures many of the truths until the last third, which manifests itself as a post-dawn autopsy that proves disarming and blackly humorous in its effect. Even then, truth itself proves pliable, and when lies come to light the perpetrators of those lies prove to have noble reasons for them.
The visual component of Anatolia is perhaps its most profound, an irony not lost on Ceylan who wants us to consider the interior souls of these men by becoming careful observers of their exteriors and the serene but lonesome landscape they inhabit. In the first hour, there’s a quiet, lulling melancholy to the images of the search party’s vehicles wending over shadowy hills and valleys, their occupants engaged in conversations that shed light on who they are and how they form the portrait of this event. Ceylan arranges these interludes amidst a series of scenes that could almost be still-life paintings for their intricate structure and patient meditation.
In the film’s satisfying conclusion, one of these characters finally steps forward and draws a close to the audience’s search for a moral focal point. By the time we have gotten there though, Ceylan has wandered off from his original course and gotten lost in the metaphorical Turkish countryside, waving his flashlight beam around to capture fleeting glimpses of social and political unrest personified in the handful of figures shuffling about in the night. Like most of his other films, Anatolia has been leeched of obvious drama and emotional cues and while there’s enough provided to keep us engaged during the hefty running time, I wasn’t particularly moved or impacted by it. I remember many of the images, but their meaning fades with the close of the film. The allegory that ties into Turkish history and sociology may be interesting in the moment but it doesn’t add any substance to what struggles at times to be more than a narrative exercise.
Despite the somewhat static nature of the picture, Once Upon A Time in Anatolia is still well worth seeing, if for no other reason than that it doesn’t presume its audiences to be dopes. Ceylan trusts that we will meet the film halfway, and he does work to ensure we want to make the trip. Pursuing the ghosts of filmmakers like Krzystof Kieslowski and Andrei Tarkovsky, Ceylan imagines his films as terrariums of image, sound and life living itself out in an environment where it can be turned and studied. There are moments in Anatolia where I began to feel as if I were looking through the eye of God, taking in the comings and goings of figures less significant than they seem, without judgment. Judgment, for the viewer, comes at the end of a long journey and it’s like a flash of light in the darkness.