Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Friday, January 6, 2012) (1)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time In Anatolia has almost no action in it, and yet is is one of the best policiers I've seen in a long time. The film opens in a small police car as five men drive around the Turkish countryside looking for a particular, but hard-to-find location. It seems the man in the middle of the back seat has admitted to murdering a man and dumping his body. The cops in this car, and two other cars in a caravan, are out looking for that location, along with the prosecutor and a doctor who is there to give medical evidence at the scene of the crime. Because the murder occurred at night, the man has difficulty knowing exactly where the body is now.

Considering they are driving around at night in the first half of the film, it is shot mostly in extreme chiaroscuro, with the dark black outside interrupted only by the moonlight reflected on the men's faces and the occasional headlights in wide landscape shots. The roads they drive weave around the rolling hills of Anatolia, generally directionless, and the murderer tries to recall where the act was committed, possibly near a natural spring, possibly near a tree, maybe with a bridge nearby and a wide farmer's field.

This is wonderful and pure Becketian existentialism as the film moves along slowly and carefully. The men have several seemingly insignificant conversations that all seem to reveal nothing. It's an immersive experience to be with them, bewildering in it's solemn pace and tone. One scene drips slowly into another. First they go to one possible location, then they go to another, then the murderer thinks he finally remember something and they go to another location, but that's not it either. We keep getting stuck in mundane and ridiculous arguments about exactly what town a certain field is in, and whether that town's line is on one side of a tree or another. It's all beautiful and rather absurdist (as we're supposed to be investigating a murder).

This film is probably the most Romanian New Wave film I've ever seen that is not a Romanian film. The long, long scenes with nothing happening are very reminiscent of Corneliu Porumboiu's brilliant Police, Adjective. Certainly the mix of existentialist non-action combined with arch bureaucratic formalism is something both these films share. Like the Porumboiu, the second half of this film brings out the absurdity of paperwork, situational malaise and the sadness connected to the browns and beiges of officialdom.

The acting throughout the film is amazing, particularly the three leads, Muhammet Uzuner (who plays the doctor), Yilmaz Erdogan (who plays the police commissioner) and Taner Birsel (who plays the prosecutor). They are totally natural and honest, a bit arch and silly at the proper moment, though straight in a way that helps to underline their winking.

The whole experience of watching this film is very interesting on a meta level, I think. It's 150 minutes long and almost nothing happens, yet it's almost always totally gripping. It's the lack of action, the attention you feel you must pay at every moment that keeps you glued to the screen (not unlike Chantal Akerman's masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, the formal antecedent to the Romanian New Wave).

There are small beautiful things dotted throughout the film that show that Ceylan is a brilliant director. At one moment when the caravan is driving along the country, we see the lighted windows of a train passing in the distance. Immediately we consider that for people on that train, this caravan of several cars probably looks much the same to them. There is an elegance and a minimalism to the concept that the first half of the film is shot in near darkness, while the second half takes place the following morning, in bright light. There are several more of these dualities: rural and city, nature and buildings, rich and poor (between the doctor and the functionaries), Turkish and ethnic (it seems the murderer is an ethnic minority, possibly Kurdish).

This is a long movie, but a gorgeous one. At this point in the year it is silly to suggest it's going to be my favorite film of 2012, but I can't imagine there will be many other films that I like this much. It has a beautiful script, fantastic acting and looks amazing.

Stars: 4 of 4