Once upon a time in Anatolia - review

Nuri Bilge's last year's winner at Cannes is murder in slow motion
Stripped bare: Muhammet Uzuner plays the local doctor whose professional composure is gradually eroded
Derek Malcolm16 March 2012

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films seldom make for easy viewing. And he’s never made it harder than in this winner of the Grand Prix at last year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s a murder mystery that isn’t really about the mystery or the murder at all, but about the men charged with investigating it, and perhaps about life and death itself.

If this puts you off, I should add that many who saw it at Cannes felt that it should have won the Palme D’Or rather than playing second fiddle to Terrence Malick’s more vainglorious The Tree of Life. That film fundamentally relied on a whole heap of huge gestures; Once Upon a Time (which is nothing to do with Sergio Leone, by the way) gives us a plethora of tiny psychological details which make up its impressive whole.

A man has been murdered. A suspect (Firat Tanis) has confessed and the chief of police in a small Anatolian town, the district prosecutor, the local doctor and their assistants need to find the body which the suspect — who claims he was drunk at the time — says he buried somewhere in the fields near the town.

Finally they discover it, hog-tied in the ground with one ear visible, and set about doing the jobs they are trained to do with the bureaucratic fastidiousness that masks whatever they might feel.

It’s the slow-burning interaction between them that justifies the film’s almost three-hour length. It does so without patronising these country people, who all have grumbles about their lives and their jobs.

The mayor (Ercan Kesal) proudly entertains the company with dinner and introduces his beautiful daughter with the coffee (Cansu Demirci), while complaining the job is too hard for an elderly man such as he. The prosecutor (Taner Birsel), having dictated his bald summary of events to the court clerk (Safak Karali), is revealed to have a wife who committed suicide after his drunken infidelity, and the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner) watches everything from behind protective professional armour that is gradually stripped away by the increasingly odd circumstances.

The film, beautifully shot in ravishing countryside, often at night, watches its characters so intently throughout that it would be easy to say that their psyches are exhumed along with the body of the murdered man. We never really find out whodunnit or why, but we discover a lot about each of the characters as what at first seems a simple story progresses.

This is the best controlled film of this major director — even one of the best films of the past year.

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