Once Upon A Time In Anatolia 2011
Mauricette Atencio
Who are we, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopaedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly reshuffled and reordered in every conceivable way.
In the dark of night, three vehicles approach along a road that winds across a bare, windswept plateau, pinpoints of yellowish moving, floating light. Coming to a halt beside the road, the men travelling in the convoy step out, two of them are handcuffed and have confessed to a murder; they are accompanied by an assortment of police, soldiers, two men with shovels, a public prosecutor and a doctor. They are all searching for the scene of the crime, the place where the victim is buried.
The prosecutor remarks to the doctor how difficult it has been to make sense of many of the cases that he has had to deal with over the years. Sometimes, he thinks, you have to be more of an astrologer than a prosecutor to divine motives and causes. Most mysteriously, he recounts the story of a woman who, five months after giving birth, died on the exact day she predicted she would, without any signs at all of ill health or self-harm.
Anatolia is an ancient name for much of modern Turkey. It is the name associated with much of Turkey from the days of Alexander the Great. What is important for the viewer to note and reflect on is that Ceylan chose the term Anatolia rather than Turkey, when the tale he presents is of modern day Turkey, of individuals and mindsets that are not historical but contemporary. Perhaps for Ceylan and co-sciptwriters (comprising his wife Ebru Ceylan and Ercan Kasal, the very same team that wrote the brilliant Three Monkeys) the mindset and values have not changed with time and perhaps for them modern Turkey is no different from Anatolia of the ages past.
An ancient world a modern/contemporary world what difference does it make? We live a life always wishing we lived another because there really is only one way to live and that is to make life decisions that honour our divine creator who promises to reward all who do so to time indefinite.
Indeed, the subliminal presence of the victim buried somewhere out there in the swathes of encroaching blackness exhumes suppressed emotions and harrowing thoughts. Through the elegant and lingering cinematography, Ceylan effortlessly reminds us of our own mortality during these crepuscular hours and how important it is to value what we have before it is too late.
He browses through a selection of black and white photographs: as a young boy on the beach on holiday; as a young doctor with friends and family; as a young man with an attractive woman deeply in love. The Anatolian landscape with its deadly shadows has formed a palpably aching nostalgia in remembrance for all things past and forgotten and again we are indescribably moved.
As with all his other films, Ceylan reminds us of our fragile, seemingly futile existence in the cold light of the Istanbulite sun. There are no happy endings for our characters as they resume their daily business, other than a reflective poignancy and bittersweet remorse. Their hearts may have been opened by the divinatory visitation of Beauty herself but nothing has fundamentally changed, only their apperception of life itself.
T. S. Eliot once reminded us that humankind cannot bear very much reality. And yet, when reality is thrust upon us, we are inevitably forced to succumb to its all-encompassing stranglehold, with its inherent pain and regret and suffering, through which, paradoxically, we may find quiet resolution and acceptance, and even, perhaps, a modicum of peace.
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, the latest film from Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, opens with a shot of an obscured pane of glass, a dirty window leaking light and motion onto its greasy surface. Focus pulls us past the hazy faade and inside the kitchen of an auto repair shop; three men sit together, enjoying a joke and eating some dinner. Outside, a dog barks, drawing one of the men outside with a plate of bones. As the dog enjoys his treat, storm clouds gather overhead, threatening. The sense of dread is palpable; despite the good humor, nothing good will come of this. And nothing does.
After its ominous prologue, the film continues with the first in a series of expansive widescreen shots of the Turkish countryside; from a distance, we see the headlights of cars as they wind their way along the narrow road. Soon, they arrive at their destination and their purpose becomes clear; there has been a murder and the police, coroner and prosecutor are accompanying the confessed killers in search of the body. Told over the course of a single night and morning, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia spends its time in search of both a body and something far more intangible: the nature of masculinity and its corruption.
This might seem a simplification, but gratefully, Ceylan is far too gifted a filmmaker to simply lay his cards on the table. Instead, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia is sculpted magnificently by the passing of time, by desire. As the night moves forward, into the gloaming of the pre-dawn hours, the disorientation of the search manifests itself in a small village where the party seeks respite. Here, the mayor of the town welcomes the men, allowing his beautiful daughter to serve them tea during an unexpected blackout; as the men drift in and out of sleep, ghosts begin to appear and the daughter begins to haunt their dreams. This loosening of time and its disorienting effect on the party allows them to begin opening up to one another, to begin making confessions, to transform their relationships. It is a bravura sequence, full of hallucination and feeling, that sends the film hurtling toward its heartbreaking conclusion.
Like all great art, Once Upon A Time In Anatolia seems to be operating on a million levels all at once; the film clearly deals with class, with the corrupting power and self-delusion of authority, with urban and rural cultural expectations, with the narrow distance between a murderer and a man whose narcissism causes a death of its own. Ceylan has made great films before; perhaps, like me, you feel he has made them exclusively. But with each new movie, his mastery of the form seems to expand, enriching his cinema with an otherworldly, poetic power that I find absolutely gripping. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia stands alongside the finest work in contemporary cinema, a thrilling example of a director in full command of his copious gifts.
Painterly compositions and languid, discursive storytelling are the hallmarks of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a meditative masterpiece of a policier. The Cinema Guild hide caption
Once upon a time, long ago, I asked the late, great Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski why his Three Colors triptych was so operatic. He thought about this for a minute. "My dear," he said dryly, "life is boring," and then he tucked into his lunch.
I've thought of that exchange often when pondering the cosmos and paying the gas bill, but never more so than while watching Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a ravishingly atmospheric new Turkish film about the entanglement of life's big-ticket dramas with the red tape that comes with getting through the day.
At least I think that's what it's about. Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who made the equally opaque and nourishing Climates (2006) and Three Monkeys (2008), isn't a man to put his thematic cards on the table. In Anatolia, the mundane, the profound and the ineffable mingle freely within the frame of a policier that's stacked to the gills with seemingly irrelevant process.
A police commissar (Yilmaz Erdogan, left) and a junior officer (Murat Kilic, right) are among the men shepherding a confessed murderer (Firat Tanis) as he tries to track down the body he's supposedly stashed in the vast landscapes of rural Turkey. The Cinema Guild hide caption
Much of this is mordantly funny, though there's an edge of panicky farce, and gradually the willfully digressive detail piles up into a pervasive unease whose source you can't quite put your finger on.
By the time the men stop for a meal in the village that's home to the suspect and the dead man, just about everyone is starting to unravel. Let's just say that neither the presence of the village elder's beautiful daughter nor the hair-raisingly rocky performance of an autopsy help to calm the waters.
Before the lights go up there will have been a formal confession of sorts, plus several others wedged into the busy ancillary activity. There will be moments of goofy kindness, and in the doctor's mournful gaze after the shapely figure of a woman, a hint at another confession that may never be made. In this, as in all of Ceylan's films, it's the distractions and elisions, not the official stories, that carry the existential weight of the days of our lives. (Recommended)
This is a remarkable film, a very long film, in which very little happens. It's about something fairly important, in that three car loads of gentlemen for most of the film's length are driving around the bleak landscape of Central Anatolia for an important reason, but that reason seems to be out of proportion with the journey they endure.
The next we see, after the titles, is a barren landscape in fading light, as a bunch of cars drive across, looking for something. It will be a long time for us and them before they find anything. More so for us.
What follows is a very naturalistic, very mundane police procedural, but don't for a second confuse it with a CSI: Turkey. It's not a forensic investigation or even an investigation. These chaps know who committed the crime, and the guilty are there with them as they drive around in their cars. In fact, there's not a scintilla of mystery to the proceedings. There's just cold hard reality.