Somewhere in the empty steppes of rural Turkey, a convoy of police vehicles wanders aimlessly, looking for a body.
From time to time the assemblage of vehicles stops; everyone gets out to see if this is it, if this is where the body is buried, and returns 15 minutes later without success, no, the body must have been buried somewhere else, and the search goes on, and the quiet frustration builds up ever so slightly, and rinse and repeat for the first hour and a half of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.
I’ve talked about Ceylan on this blog before, when I recommended his other great film The Wild Pear Tree. That movie was pretty good; this is his masterpiece.
In a typical crime story or murder mystery, the point is the mystery. We allow the film to spin webs of deception around us as we feel the thrill of looking at evidence, piecing clues together, until – aha! we have our answer! It all comes together in a beautiful finale.
Here, Ceylan gives us none of that delight; we start out knowing who the murderers are (they confessed), and who the victim is. Instead, the entire movie is centered around the trivial, bureaucratic necessity of finding the body, and even that is somewhat known. The murderer, who was drunk at the time, simply cannot remember where he buried his victim’s corpse. Disoriented in the dark, he gives many false positives. Many frustrations for the rest of the team.
The poor souls in these police cars are equally as muddled as their captive – there is Mr Prosecutor, a handsome, slightly narcissistic attorney who prides himself on his resemblance to Clark Gable; there is the hot-headed police chief who quickly loses his temper at the murderer, flying into a rage at yet another false flag; there is the Doctor who more observes than speaks, whose rational, silent gaze gives a center to the film. There is a quietly furious driver, and a nerdy, goody-two-shoes military officer who needlessly and obsessively calculates the fine details of district borders, oblivious to the pall cast over his comrades.
And as the investigation plays out, this motley cast of characters begins engaging in light small talk. They converse about subjects as varied as yoghurt, Turkey’s quest to join the EU, and prostate cancer. Slowly but surely, we begin to learn more about the occupants of these police cars. Eventually, the discussions shift away from trivial matters, and the Prosecutor begins telling the Doctor a story; the tale of the wife of a friend, who somehow predicted the day of her own death. That story will end up revealing a lot more about the Prosecutor than he would have liked, and the doctor clinically digs up revelations that hit his friend hard. Armed with a scalpel, Ceylan chips away at his characters to reveal the problems they are running away from, the ugly truths, the buried traumas that haunt them. That Chekhovian character study is the beauty in Ceylan’s movies. Men will do anything except get therapy.
If the title Once Upon a Time in Anatolia sounds like a fable, or a fairy-tale, that’s because the movie is those things. Ceylan’s camera often shows us the hilly grasses gently swaying in the wind, and one gets the sense that this story is inherently Anatolian. This landscape must have seen many weary travellers like this discussing their own issues, many stories like this. This particular night was one of them, and it will be woven into the fabric of these hills.
“You might be bored to death now, but later you’ll get a kick out of what’s going on here. One day, when you have a family, you can say ‘Once upon a time in Anatolia, when I was working in the sticks, I remember this one night which began like this.’ You can tell it like a fairytale. Is that so bad?”
In the distance, a train passes by, and Police Chief Naci returns; the body wasn’t there.
I mentioned earlier that the allure of a mystery is the neat, logical resolution it gives us. The mysteries presented in this near 3-hour film are a lot tougher to resolve, and remain lingering at the end of the film. They are the grand questions of life itself, and morality. We never truly know why Kenan murdered Yasar; we never know why the Doctor obscures a tiny but significant detail at the end when writing the autopsy report. There are hints, but they often contradict and muddle each other. The truth becomes degenerated when it passes through so many mouths, when it is tweaked by so many motives. So the hints forever remain that, just hints.
Life and human behaviour are big mysteries when we think about it – we can never truly comprehend the infinite depth in either of them. But we can search for meaning, and in doing so, get lost in the endless windswept plains of Anatolia, illuminated only by the headlights of our own cars…
– Karthik Baskar
Beyond The Hype 
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