Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Review

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a delicately paced, sprawling piece of work that provides plenty of food for thought and stunning scenery to chew on after a hunt for a corpse proves a catalyst for philosophical discussions on life, death, love and buffalo yoghurt.

Set mostly in the darkest hours of the night, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia follows a doctor, a prosecutor, a police chief and a whole host of other sweaty, tired men squashed like sardines into three cars as they roam the hills of Anatolia looking for a buried body. Given direction by the two self-confessed killers, the search soon proves troublesome as one mountainside blends into another and the hunt for a nearby ‘round’ tree slowly becomes as ridiculous as it sounds.

Temperamental vehicles, a weak bladder and the incompetence of the worst grave diggers in Turkey soon give the men ample opportunities to chat amongst themselves about issues ranging from the flippant, to the humorous to the spiritual and back again and it’s precisely these glimpses into the characters souls that really make Anatolia something special.

An age old battle between science and faith begins when the prosecutor tells the doctor the story of the most beautiful woman he’s ever laid eyes on, a wife of a friend who predicted the exact time of her own death. Not counting an arguably less weighty earlier discussion on buffalo yoghurt, this is the first of many enlightening conversations that the men find themselves dwelling on as the search for the rotting corpse provokes thoughts about their own existence and it’s really only in retrospect that you begin to realise how deep each characters stories run. By the end of the film, you begin to realise, without ever being told in words, just why the doctor can’t bring himself to believe a woman had the ability to predict her own death and similarly, why the prosecutor must.

It’s a mysterious film, and I’m certain to have missed something. The mere sight of the mayor’s daughter seem to leave each man in turn wrestling with some form of epiphany and lights flicker when she’s around. In an almost silent sequence, she is presented as almost mythical, an unashamedly beautiful image of everything that’s good. When one of them makes the observation that she’ll probably live and die in the tiny isolated pocket of the world without ever truly spreading her wings, it’s a deeply affecting and painful moment and you can’t help but feel a pang of surprise for feeling so caught up in a figure that remains so entirely enigmatic.

The film is slow but crucially so. Thanks to the first ninety minutes unfolding largely in real time, you really feel the strain of the investigation. You’re encouraged to think, make judgements, put back-stories together and dwell on the philosophical issues that, along with the corpse, are keeping these men up at night. But, in a film that’s two hours and thirty minutes long, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Anatolia is another example of the critic friendly slow cinema; the type that’s clearly impressive upon reflection but, and say it quietly, can be mind (and bum) numbingly dull to actually sit through (Despite his eye for beauty, Béla Tarr was something of a serial offender).

Despite characters wandering the hills claiming ‘this is dragging’, Once Upon A Time in Anatolia doesn’t, that is until you’ve seen far too much wonder to care. Yes, at one moment when the doors to an autopsy room swing open and you’re not greeted by the end credits, you can’t help but begin to feel the films running time, but thankfully, this is only twenty minutes before the end. Transformers: Dark of the Moon was four minutes longer, Jackson’s King Kong was thirty seven and both have far duller twenty minute stretches than anything seen in Anatolia; a film which has to make do without the acting clout of Shia LaBeouf or the timeless appeal of a massive gorilla.

Reading this back, I feel that maybe I’m selling Once Upon A Time in Anatolia as a little heavy, but the film balances its soul with a lot of dark humour. The police chief’s rotund driver, Arab Ali, can barely speak a word or move a step without raising a laugh and Turkey’s answer to the Chuckle Brothers can be found in the hapless gravediggers. Add to this a body bag that proves just as difficult to locate as the body and by the time the sun rises, Anatolia finds itself, albeit sporadically, a bruised funny bone.

It’s not for everyone, and like any film that takes its time, if you’re not ready to engage with Ceylan’s ideas on his own terms, you’ll find yourself struggling. But it’s a beautiful film and whilst its final stretch may test the patience of a saint, it’s rare to see a film so thoughtful pack so many laughs, visual treats and complex character depth into its long running time without getting tiresome. If only ‘slow’ cinema could always be this rewarding.  Seek it out.