A CRIME DRAMA WITH A TWIST: "ONCE UPON A TIME IN ANATOLIA"

I have, I am pretty sure, written about Nuri Bilg Ceylan before. I have said, if I recall that his art is very much an acquired taste. Back in the day, I hated his films; they seemed to me rather pretentious, without much content, just one of those films that perhaps win so many awards because people cannot really understand what’s going on and thus assume whatever it is, is deep. The thing is, what is going on IS deep. It is just not immediately obvious to the untrained eye. The same goes for all brands of minimalist cinema. It’s a bit like plunging straight into Goethe’s Faust the moment you learn German. However, once you have acquired said taste this film is definitely the one for you. Or even if you just want to try something a little different. I have seen quite a few of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films – if not all of them – and I personally feel that this is his best film yet… Our setting is a small town in the middle of central Anatolia. The steppes stretching out seemingly endlessly look very much like one another, life is tough and the men living there are even tougher. Two cars are driving through a dark, unlit night. But nothing two shifty is afoot. Two men, brothers, have been convicted of murder. The older brother – seemingly more intelligent than his rather “slow” younger brother anyway – has confessed to the murder, all this is fine but there is one small problem. They seem to be unable to locate the body. The suspect claims he buried it somewhere out of town so the police chief, the coroner, the prosecuter (increasingly irritated by the whole affair dragging on so late) the gendarmes and the suspects are rattling on through the night trying to make sense of the older brother’s rather vague description of where the body was buried. “I had had a bit to drink” he mutters apologetically. This is not so much a murder mystery - or rather not the kind of murder mystery you think it is, but I’ll let you discover that as you watch the film – but an occasion to take a closer look at the hearts of men, life in small towns and how very ordinary people cope with extraordinary things that happen in their lives. These lives are not exactly populated with extraordinary happenings, thus the coping mechanisms developed can be… Well you’re going to have to watch and see. First of all, rest assured, there is nothing neither gory nor sinister and supernatural about this film. Well, nothing more sinister than the contents of the human soul and that, I have to agree, can be pretty bad at times. The poignancy with which Ceylan paints emotions and the unexpected places and contexts in which these emotions emerge in all their glory is quite amazing. Of course this poignancy is partly due to Ceylan’s own experience, he himself is a small town boy, the son of a government official so I assume this coupled with his powers of observation warrant largely for poignancy of the film. And something simply has to be said about the cinematography. Ceylan was originally more interested in taking photographs and this is very, very obvious from the beauty of some of the scenes and the framing. There are haunted, beautiful portraits of Anatolia dotted among this very human tragedy. The secret of watching and enjoying this film is to not get stuck on the whole murder thing. Of course the murder (or murders, but like I said I don’t want to give too many details on that one) are important but they are far from being the main thing. Focus on what is going on around them, the characters, their reactions, the mood created. If you do, a whole different film is going to emerge for you, and you will be able to follow the “real” story as it were. I concede that it is slightly hard going, almost 2 and a half hours long and in Turkish but I sincerely hope you give it a spin. There really was a reason for it winning the Grand Prix at Cannes…