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Once Upon A Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da) – Art 5/5 Ent 1/5 Worth 5/5
If you are unafraid of a dry, cerebral and at times byzantine film (no pun intended), I give my unequivocal recommendation for Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s visually evocative exploration of the culture and rolling hills of central Turkey, with the subtle margins of a murder mystery as a background. Usually, it’s the other way around. And therein lies the main gamble of Ceylan’s bitter yet zesty film: compromise a lot in the way of easily accessible and pleasing narrative to film a gorgeously naturalistic story, whose specifics and particulars are utterly elusive. So again, dry. Very, very dry. But damned beautiful.
Opening with three friends enjoying an evening as a storm is approaching, the film then shoots to a late night search in the hills for a buried body, one of the friends now in handcuffs. Hints are dropped of a story hanging over our head that’s too transfixing to piece together. There’s one weird look here, another of complete shock there, one of the supposed culprits telling the other to “shut up” when he’s about to break. We’re intentionally teased in our ignorance, and given no closure. What we are given is a coterie of officials: a typical working class policeman boob, an overconfident detective/prosecutor who fancies that he looks like Clark Gable, a measured doctor, all trying to patch together the same mystery as us.
In one key scene, the prosecutor oversteps his own self-restraint by lamenting the tragedy of modernity with an anecdote of a beautiful woman who knew the date of her oncoming death, and after the doctor’s Baconian bullshit detector rings, leading him to explain the impossibility of such superstitious nonsense, the detective explains the anecdote’s more personal and vengeful aspects. It’s a nugget of heartbreak in a film without a larger story, a canary flying in a vacated Madison Square Garden. But it colors the rest of the disturbing ennui in a way that makes it all strikingly make sense. Once Upon A Time in Anatolia is named thus not as an homage to the Sergio Leone action epics but from the ostensibly true story behind the screenplay where the police involved described the murder in such mock epic terms. I would be lying if I said I didn’t go in expecting more epic than art film. But though it was like eating the vegetable side of an entree, it was beyond satisfying.
Two of the leads, Muhammet Uzuner and Taner Birsel, playing the doctor and prosecutor, respectively, are both quite interesting actors. This is one of only a handful of Turkish films I’ve seen, so I’m unaware of their other work, but they both played roles effectively that were extremely demanding in keeping explosive emotion contained. Taner Birsel especially reminded of Robert DeNiro when he’s on his game and not hamming it up. The expressive thousand yard stares are what really get to you in this movie, recalling a harsher existence in the countryside of a developing country and the harshness if afflicts on people.
