Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)

Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Three cars are driving on a winded road through the rural Anatolian landscape, over hills and through plateaus, with their yellow headlights being the only illuminators of the unfolding night. Two of the men inside the car are convicts that have confessed to a murder and are accompanied by a group of law enforcers in order to show them the place where they buried the corpse. Derived from this crime plot, a trip through the endless night, and the endless depths and tormented ghosts of these men begins.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan is one of his three films that each won him the Palme D’or or Grand Jury Prize of the Cannes Film Festival. Ceylan began his artistic life as a photographer and his cinematography is gorgeous, his pictures stunning to look at. Anatolia‘s visual poetry lays in the nocturnal hills and valleys of a rural Anatolia, its shades varying from the cold-monochrome palette of dawn to pitch-black with warm and focused illuminations by the yellow headlights.

Ceylan is one of the greatest film-makers of our times, he makes a serious, ambitious and introspective cinema in the tradition of Bergman, Tarkovsky, and Antonioni, which makes his work as non-mainstream and unacknowledged by the masses like the works of named European auteurs. Deeply inspired by Russian author Chekhov, his cinema feeds its fascination from the abandonment of the ‘event plot’, making way for something more ‘blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life’. And so, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is much more than a neo-noir or road-movie. The entire film is a tender male lament, fleeting, a rare poetic tale of male struggle- and beauty.

We have a killer whose Fellini-face is unfathomable, but visibly tormented by guilt and shame. Two policemen who have their hearts in the right spot, but resent being so low on the executive and social ladder, particularly on that night. The soldier with his inhuman, inadequate professionalism and obedience. The village mayor as prototype of the religious type who moves nothing forward, since all comes from God in his argument. Blackouts, bad streets… everything is God’s will.

We have a doctor, whom most reflections and monologues in Anatolia are being granted. A melancholic thinker citing Russian poetry, with the memory of a past love lingering over all of his thoughts. Always a stranger, he is in the heart of the film, silently witnessing and inwardly writing down the dramas that will be locked within his heavy heart.

We have the handsome middle-aged prosecutor who, in the wake of this special night, recounts the story of a woman who died on the exact day she predicted she would, and of seemingly natural causes. This prosecutor breaks our hearts twice: when in the end he reveals that this woman was his wife, who punished him with her death for having cheated on her. And then he breaks our heart with his nostalgic mention of his resemblance with Clark Gable, while he dictates the report about the exhumed corpse- one last tragic hint of ingrained vanity while everything is fading.

These are some of the many intense moments of Chekhovian explorations of interior lives in the film, and they reveal male beauty, which is a rare exploration in cinema. It is an ambitious and stunning achievement, hence every exploration teaches us something about us, even if we cannot relate. There is a visual and linguistic articulation and clear delivery of these deep-cutting introspections, that some of us cannot even reach when we look into the mirror. What is amazing about Anatolia is the slow pace, and yet what is going on is so intense, almost feverish. Hypnotic observations of nature with the nocturnally amplified sounds of wind and water. Brilliant scenes of dialogues that turn out to be monologues, since we see no lips moving after the camera focuses on the faces. The dignity and silence with which these men reveal themselves and their tragedies.

The crime in Anatolia never gets fully revealed due to a silent cover-up by the doctor, who heard the truth, and sees the truth while he is dissecting the corpse. It is a wordless measurement of crime and punishment, weighing rational law-enforcement against the unregarded and unrewarded generosity of granting a rest of dignity and mercy, even to somebody that we would like to call a monster. The full horror and vileness has not to be dissected when justice has already prevailed. Another symptom of Ceylan’s directorial style, which marks a major resistance to the effect-laden sensationalism of contemporary film.

With the exception of two crucial scenes, women are physically absent in Anatolia, while everything revolves around them. Their presence and power is manifested in the film’s title and the literal meaning of the Turkish heartland: Anatolia – Anadolu- ‘ana dolu’- ‘full of mothers’. „I have been a cop for 20 years now, I have seen things you would not believe… may I be damned if even once it was not about a woman“, as the policeman puts it. But also on the introspective level, these men are all haunted by women, and by being so, the film is granting females more power and significance than any screen presence or women’s quota could do. It is not about the loudness and presence, and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia would not be the same masterpiece with women in it.

Rarely does a film achieve raw truth, and even rarer is this truth delivered as poetry: glances, flickers of thoughts, struggles you start to feel, with a cosmic lament taking possession of you. Once Upon A Time in Anatolia is a masterpiece, and the best film of its decade.

by Saliha Enzenauer

Read all stories in our special about Nuri Bilge Ceylan and his films:
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia (2011)
Winter Sleep (2014)
The Wild Pear Tree (2018)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan On His Beginnings And Art- An Interview