Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (M). Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Starring: Muhammet Uzuner, Yilmaz Erdogan, Taner Birsel, Firat Tanis. 150 minutes
A group of police, medical and legal professionals unearth a corpse from a shallow grave, and are outraged to discover that it has been hogtied. The confessed murderer (Tanis) says it was not sadism but expediency that prompted him to bind the limbs in such a fashion: it made the body easier to transport.
The man's blunt pragmatism seems equally horrific to his outraged captors. Yet moments later they too commit an absurd horror, as they attempt to stuff the body into a car boot in order to transport it back to town. Someone has forgotten to bring a body bag, so a tarpaulin is used to loosely shroud the body. It is debatable whether the murderer or the ones who purport to restore justice have treated the body with the greater indignity.
Once Upon A Time in Anatolia is laced with such dark ironies and psychological uncertainties. It paints a time and place where human behaviour is determined by slack bureaucracy, and where natural empathy (let along grace) seems ever at odds with an encroaching world-weariness that borders on apathy.
The title alludes to Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, and Turkish filmmaker Ceylon's film does bear stylistic comparison to Leone's vast spaghetti western. It is as epic and brooding as the Turkish steppe upon which its bleak fairytale unfolds; long takes of striking landscapes, riven by the sounds of trickling water and creeping breeze, establish a powerful sense of place, against which the human characters are merely interlopers.
Among them are the confessed murderer and his brother; a police chief with a point to prove (Erdogan); a cocky prosecutor haunted by a metaphysical delusion (Birsel); and a doctor (Uzuner) undergoing an existential crisis of his own. Over the course of one long night, they traipse the fields and knolls of the steppe, searching for the body; the killer, who was drunk when the crime occurred, has forgotten where he buried it.
As the night progresses (and both before and after the body is eventually discovered) confidences are shared, sympathies shift and characters' integrity is tested. The doctor's willingness to share a cigarette with the prisoner stands in stark contrast to the police chief's latent brutality. The police chief himself has his own insecurities that further try his temper. Almost every supporting