Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – Awarded the Gran Prix at Cannes in 2011, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s (pronounced “Jay-lawn”) long film is grave, riveting, and resonates in the imagination long after you have watched the picture. I found myself dreaming about events in the movie. Ceylan’s previous picture, Distant, an account of a visit by a country cousin to a would-be filmmaker living in Istanbul – the director in the movie wants to Turkey’s Tarkovsky – was a little too mannered and remote (not surprisingly given the title) for me, although I recall that panoramas of the Turkish metropolis wreathed in snow were extraordinary beautiful. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia channels Ceylan’s deep and abiding melancholy into a police procedural and, although the picture is minimalist in some respects – not much happens – oblique references to Sergio Leone’s westerns, the sheer force of the performances which are all outstanding, and the filmmaker’s visionary eye for landscape combine to create a film that is completely intriguing and constantly gripping. Three carloads of government officials are driving across a desolate, semi-arid grassland somewhere near Ankara. It is night and the vehicles’ golden headlights illuminate great seas of undulating grass. The officials have a murderer and his accomplice in tow and are searching for the grave of the murder victim. We don’t know why the killing occurred. In the first scene, we see the three men, the assailants and their victim, very much alive in a ramshackle service station eating their supper and smoking cigarettes. The murder victim comes to a spectacularly dirty and clouded window and looks out at the dark sky. Then, we see him feed a mutt outside the garage in the lonely light shining down from a power pole in the yard outside. The murder may have involved a woman – we see a secretive, bitter-looking widow later – but is never explained. The killers were drinking, apparently bludgeoned the man to death, and, then, buried his body somewhere in the endless and monotonous prairie. The killer can’t quite recall the location and everything looks alike. There is a fountain, he explains, and a round tree – and so the sad-sack caravan of cops and bureaucrats drives slowly through the darkness, stopping at little walls from which water is trickling – the “fountains” look like artesian wells at the roadside, lost in a vast landscape that has the physiognomy of the Missouri Breaks near Chamberlain, South Dakota or the Pine Ridge country in west Nebraska. For the first hour, the caravan searches without luck. The police chief gets mad and beats up the suspect who, later, unexpectedly asks the harried police chief (he is nagged by his wife on cell-phone about picking up medications for their son, who is possibly an epileptic) to care for his little boy. He claims that the widow’s child is his son. Increasingly, the focus is on a coroner, recently separated from his beautiful wife, and the county prosecutor – they ride with the satanic-looking primary suspect between them in one of the cars. The county prosecutor is haunted by the story of a woman who apparently predicted her own death, accomplishing her demise five days after giving birth to her son. The film hints that the prosecutor’s wife may have been this woman, although this is never made clear. In the middle of the night, the party stops in a small village where the men are greeted with a sort of feast, the power fails, the murderer has a vision of his victim, and a beautiful young woman, like something glimpsed in a dream, serves them tea – these scenes are exceptionally beautiful in a strange, becalmed way. Ceylan is a master of filming in low light and the images of the young woman bringing honey-colored tea to the men on a lamplit tray have a great, mythic resonance. (Indeed, the film’s approach to the strange, beautiful, empty and menacing landscape is mythic as well – in one scene, the coroner goes into a ravine to urinate and, in the flash of a lightning strike, we see, and are startled by, a big stone face, something left over from 400 BC, embedded in the side of the badlands.) In the morning, the exhausted men find the corpse partly uncovered by a fearsome-looking black German shepherd and, after some grim farce (the deputies have not brought a body bag) the body is brought back to a small city where an autopsy is conducted by the fatigued doctor, his cynical assistant, and the prosecutor. Something terrible is discovered which the doctor serving as coroner suppresses, even, lies about by falsifying his official report. The doctor stands at a window and watches the dead man’s widow and the little boy, who is probably the killer’s son, walking past a school. A soccer ball flies up from the playground and the little boy kicks it back down to the other children. The doctor looks pensively from the window for a while then departs from the frame and the film is over. Ceylan’s movie suggests far more than it explains and there are many extraordinary images – a train crossing the horizon at night (a reference I think to the train in Once Upon a Time in the West), the wind stirring the beautiful young woman’s hair as she plucks laundry off the clothes line, a black cat playing with a plastic garbage bag, and the faces of the men are fantastically weathered, beautiful, and intense – a landscape of hairy eyebrows and pitted cheeks: several of the handsome Turks look something like Eli Wallach or Lee J. Cobb. For me, this film establishes Ceylan as a major director, a filmmaker whose works are worthy of being sought out and studied.