Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

There’s an astound­ing and coura­geous­ly digres­sive ​‘instance’ near the mid-point of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s hyp­not­ic meta­phys­i­cal noir, Once Upon a Time In Ana­to­lia, around which the remain­der of the film’s events take ran­dom orbit.

A rag­tag unit of swarthy Turk­ish police inspec­tors have been labo­ri­ous­ly tra­vers­ing the Ana­to­lia foothills at night in an attempt to coerce a weary perp into reveal­ing where he com­mit­ted an undis­closed felony while drunk.

Fol­low­ing much fruit­less search­ing, they hole up in a hill­side vil­lage where they are offered food and shel­ter. The lis­som daugh­ter of the vil­lage elder serves them tea dur­ing a pow­er cut. Her face is illu­mi­nat­ed by can­dle­light. As each mem­ber of the crew glances up at her, they appear momen­tar­i­ly awestruck – one mem­ber of the par­ty is moved to tears – by this fleet­ing vision of purity.

The rel­e­vance of this short scene is entwined with moti­va­tion and atti­tude more than it is with nar­ra­tive: var­i­ous char­ac­ters appear changed, awok­en from a spir­i­tu­al tor­por by the frag­ile gaze of this fall­en angel.

Ceylan’s sixth, and great­est, fea­ture is about the tran­si­to­ry, often unseen moments of intense beau­ty that occur in a world over­run by vio­lence and des­o­la­tion. It also sees the awe­some­ly tal­ent­ed writer-direc­tor again indulging his fas­ci­na­tion with the ways in which mid­dle-aged men psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly equip them­selves to deal with a cri­sis (see: Three Mon­keys, Cli­mates and Uzak).

Despite inti­ma­tions from the out­set, this is a film about the mechan­ics of an inves­ti­ga­tion rather than the inves­ti­ga­tion itself. Recall­ing noth­ing less than Antonioni’s mod­ernist 1955 man-hunt, L’Avventura, the rev­e­la­tion of corpses, the fran­tic extract­ing of con­fes­sions and the efforts to keep this ad-hoc inqui­si­tion with­in the bounds of the law are a mere frame­work from which a pen­e­trat­ing explo­ration of process, chaos, doubt and death hang.

Indeed, Cey­lan is aware that a sto­ry built on a foun­da­tion of swarthy men talk­ing, some­times in fields, oth­er times in cars, has the poten­tial to test the patience. That is why each shot is cap­tured with the pre­ci­sion of an old mas­ter, the ​‘action’ enveloped in some of the most bewitch­ing, ethe­re­al cin­e­matog­ra­phy you’re like­ly to see pro­ject­ed on to a can­vas screen this year.

Here is a film that locates new aes­thet­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties for the mun­dane, such as one breath­tak­ing digres­sion in which Ceylan’s cam­era inno­cent­ly fol­lows an apple as it rolls down a hill and then floats down a stream.

As inter­est­ed as it is in process, Ceylan’s film does adopt a firm moral stand­point, ulti­mate­ly decry­ing the vio­lence and hatred gen­er­at­ed by crim­i­nal acts. As the film hones in on a world-weary doc­tor for its final act, we join him for a rou­tine autop­sy – ren­dered in a gut-wrench­ing sym­pho­ny of squelch­es and tis­sue tears – which brings with it a shroud of inescapable melancholy.

Much like the inves­ti­ga­tion itself, this film is slow, detailed and ulti­mate­ly left wide open for the view­er to locate the beau­ty behind the shroud of dark­ness, and the answers inside the soiled corpse.