5. Turkey — Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
2011, directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Like peeling a ripe fruit, rich textured layers are gradually revealed. On the surface, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia can be described as a police procedural. But, the arc of a typical “whodunnit” is subverted by telling the viewer from the very beginning who did it and how. Instead, for almost three hours we follow a group of lonely men, through the night and into the next day, driving around the rural Turkish countryside. The alleged murderer has confessed and agreed to lead police to the victim’s body, but he himself has forgotten where he buried it. Tragedy and comedy.
The film is preoccupied with three central figures, besides the murderer: a doctor, a prosecutor, and a police chief. The police chief appears to be a brutish sort of “law and order” caricature. He grimly remarks to his colleagues how he’s seen so much violence on the job that he is numb to it all, and in the next scene he displays the least self-control and overreacts with the most emotion out of everyone. “A handful of bees . . . all noise and no action,” the prosecutor describes him, both aptly and condescendingly. However, our view of him softens as we learn about his difficulties with his special needs son and how he copes with his problems by burying himself in work. You start out thinking one way about a character, and later on you learn something new and your view of them changes.
The prosecutor is portrayed as a competent, educated, and driven man, at first. But, over the course of the film, you learn that he is more vain and less emotionally intelligent than he appears. He tells the doctor a story of a beautiful young woman who correctly predicted her own death and died as suddenly as she predicted. The doctor probes into this mysterious death and theorizes that this woman most likely committed suicide. The prosecutor, a man of logic and reason, slowly realizes this devastating truth that was in front of him the whole time. The N.Y. Times described this film as a “searching reflection on the elusiveness of truth.”
The doctor is perhaps the most mysterious and tortured character. At the same time, the least is explicitly revealed about him. Instead, we learn bits and see hints, which have to be put together, like fragments of a broken mirror. We learn he is divorced and childless, and he keeps many old photographs of his ex-wife in his office. He’s from the big city, and although he appears to be the chief doctor for the local government, he seems to be in a sort of exile (self-imposed or otherwise) in rural Anatolia. For what, from what? We are not sure. Presented throughout the film as a cold rationalist and man of science, he makes a choice at the end of the film that leaves the viewer pondering.
The murder suspect himself is a textured, complex character. Although he does not reveal much about himself through dialogue, his face does the most “acting” of all the characters. He is a very tortured character, as we learn more details about the relationship between victim and perpetrator and the nature of the violent crime. The night plays out almost like a staging of how crime scenes are investigated, according to Hollywood fiction. The characters seem to have learned what their roles are and how to perform them from watching police procedurals. The prosecutor revels in being compared to Clark Gable in one scene.
In a way, all four characters are in purgatory. The earth-shaking and life-altering crime of violence has already taken place, but the consequences are still unfolding and the punishment lurking somewhere in the murky future. In the interim, the characters dive into the seemingly meaningless minutiae of a procedural. The police chief is preoccupied with finding the body, even if it means violating a few basic human rights to get there; his underlings count the kilometers they’ve driven outside the city limits, laser focused on the extent of their local jurisdiction. After the body is found, the police mostly leave the story. It becomes the prosecutor’s time to shine when a report is made and the body is exhumed and transported back to town, and then he exits. At the end, it is the doctor left with the body in an autopsy room. One wonders, what happens to the professionals when the process is completed? I presume they wait for the next one to start all over again.
Although the pacing is very slow, the viewer’s patience is rewarded. The film is not just preoccupied with the main characters, but also how they interact with each other and subordinates. The interplay of social and professional hierarchies, as well as how they are played out, tested, and reinforced, remind me of the HBO series The Wire. The police chief bosses around his subordinates and delights in a rare opportunity to put down the doctor, when he gives a cigarette to the murder suspect, overstepping his professional boundary. The prosecutor is the director and top dog of the operation. When the frustrated police chief beats the suspect, the prosecutor intervenes and chastises him (maybe facetiously): “Is this how we’ll get into the European Union? No way!” He doesn’t get his hands dirty, literally and figuratively. Even the doctor bosses around his medical assistant during the autopsy, who in turn demeans the typist.
Mr. Ceylan’s favorite author is Anton Chekhov. Like Chekhov, this film plays with the ambiguity of truth in the alternating language of comedy and tragedy.
Although the title references Sergio Leone, its reflections on the elusive nature of TRUTH recall Rashomon. The director’s style and patience is more similar to that of Yasujiro Ozu, yet still different. What I mean is that Mr. Ceylan masterfully implements long, static landscape shots, with the only movement on-screen being headlights of the police caravan, but you hear dialogue unfold as if you were inside the car with them. The dialogue is sometimes philosophical, sometimes banal small-talk; but even the banal has the potential to be grand and significant. Because the film features these long shots and unfolds over the course of less than a day, it feels as though the story is playing out in real time. I’ve never seen anything like it, which is a high compliment. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a masterpiece and the best fictional film I’ve seen so far in this project.
I saw Once Upon a Time in Anatolia on DVD from the Arlington Public Library. You can find it on streaming platforms.
This is #5 in my World Tour of Cinema project. Read my introductory post here.
