Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Writers: Ercan Kesal, Ebru Ceylan, Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Photography: Gokhan Tiryaki
Editors: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Bora Goksingol
Cast: Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan, Ercan Kesal, Taner Birsel, Firat Tanis, Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan, Murat Kilic, Kubilay Tuncer
I like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia quite a bit—it's possibly my favorite "once upon a time" movie of all time, which is saying something ... another list below—but I'm dutybound to report that the first time I saw this long, slow, mesmerizing movie was at a public theater under unusual circumstances. It was the official closing picture of the 2011 Olympia Film Festival. The house was packed but it was more in anticipation of an after-party event. This crowd in these uncomfortable seats were not necessarily up for a long, slow, mesmerizing movie. In fact, someone just behind me heaved big sighs and muttered on the regular and checked a phone every time the scene shifted to one more very long shot of a long lonely road with cars crawling down it. It was thus harder to enjoy it but I did, and I enjoyed it again the other day when I streamed it at home (though it's probably seen best on the biggest screen possible without any carpers in attendance).
How slow is it? It's over two and a half hours but there are so many long takes and so few cuts that you could probably number them the way people do with some Bela Tarr movies. The action (such as it is) takes place across about an 18-hour period, from dusk to midday the next day, and it often feels like real-time. It's a crime picture, even a kind of police procedural, but we learn very little about the crime. The first hour and a half is spent with various officials—Mr. Prosecutor, a strange doctor, a police chief and his crew, two low-wage "diggers"—roaming in a convoy of three vehicles over the vast and empty countryside. They are looking for something. We don't learn definitively until an hour and a half in that it's a corpse they're looking for.
I like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia quite a bit—it's possibly my favorite "once upon a time" movie of all time, which is saying something ... another list below—but I'm dutybound to report that the first time I saw this long, slow, mesmerizing movie was at a public theater under unusual circumstances. It was the official closing picture of the 2011 Olympia Film Festival. The house was packed but it was more in anticipation of an after-party event. This crowd in these uncomfortable seats were not necessarily up for a long, slow, mesmerizing movie. In fact, someone just behind me heaved big sighs and muttered on the regular and checked a phone every time the scene shifted to one more very long shot of a long lonely road with cars crawling down it. It was thus harder to enjoy it but I did, and I enjoyed it again the other day when I streamed it at home (though it's probably seen best on the biggest screen possible without any carpers in attendance).
How slow is it? It's over two and a half hours but there are so many long takes and so few cuts that you could probably number them the way people do with some Bela Tarr movies. The action (such as it is) takes place across about an 18-hour period, from dusk to midday the next day, and it often feels like real-time. It's a crime picture, even a kind of police procedural, but we learn very little about the crime. The first hour and a half is spent with various officials—Mr. Prosecutor, a strange doctor, a police chief and his crew, two low-wage "diggers"—roaming in a convoy of three vehicles over the vast and empty countryside. They are looking for something. We don't learn definitively until an hour and a half in that it's a corpse they're looking for.
To be fair, we have a pretty good idea what it's all about by that point. Two scruffy suspects are in tow with the officials, trying to remember where something is buried. The police chief is impatient and abusive, which is not helped when we begin to think the suspects might be leading them on a futile chase to buy time for some reason. They take a break at about 2 a.m. and show up at the house of the mayor of a small village. The mayor offers them food and hospitality but in the middle of one of his charming stories the power goes out and they are in darkness again. The rest of the night passes fitfully. This is all given as typical for its region, Anatolia, also known as Asia Minor, which takes up a large portion of eastern modern-day Turkey ("Anatolia" means "East").
What makes it work is the strange mix of camaraderie, boredom, and tension. Obviously their work is serious, grim with death, but it's taking all night, full of uneventful stretches of driving, stopping and pulling over, and asking the suspects, "Is this it? Is this the place? Was there a fountain?" During the long interludes the social classes in this motley group of seven or eight sort themselves out. Mr. Prosecutor tells the strange doctor a story that actually originates in the short fiction of Anton Chekhov, about a woman who announces the day she will die several months in the future and then dies on that day. The doctor wants to know why they didn't perform an autopsy. This seems to flummox Mr. Prosecutor. He seems to know the woman in his story and never questioned it except as something very odd.
In the morning, with daylight, the search continues and the body they have been looking for is finally found. It is transported back to the city—not without some inspired moments of extended black comedy—and then an autopsy is performed. We learn some information about the death that the doctor decides to suppress. Then he gazes out the window for a long time, watching the widow and her son pick their way down a hill back to their part of the city, the crowded, noisy, evidently poor sector. There is some suggestion the chief suspect had some kind of connection to her. But this is where the movie ends.
Viewers of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia might benefit from a better understanding than I have of its deeply rural community, utterly alien to me. A lot of things in this movie simply go unexplained and that includes Turkish rural customs. But the ultimate point here is less the mystery of the murdered man and more the wider mystery of what we're all doing here anyway, and that comes through very well. The bulk of the movie is spent on the cadre of officials at work, who don't understand the greater or lesser mysteries any more than we do. They're just doing their jobs. In that way somehow this movie blossoms into a compelling study of human life as it is lived, strange and beautiful and mysterious. In the end it is somehow the fairy tale its title always purported it to be.
"Once Upon a Time" movies ranked
1. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
2. Once
3. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
4. Once Upon a Time in America
5. Once Upon a Time in the West
6. Once Upon a Time in China
7. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
8. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
Not seen: Once Upon a Time (1944), Once Upon a Time (2011), Once Upon a Time in Shanghai, Once Upon a Time in the East, Once Upon a Time in the Midwest, Once Upon a Time in Venice, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, many others
Throwing down your Once Upon A Time greatest-hits-list gauntlet now I have to see OUAT-in Anatolia. Last time I looked at OUAT-in America it had sunk in my estimation but OUAT-in the West had went up. Its rugged iconic beauty, the savage parable of the Westward Movement. Still want to see Lagaan too.
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