Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Blu-ray

Grand Prix winner at Cannes in 2011, this brilliantly filmed anti-crime drama takes us through a long night of searching that touches the mysterious essence of cinema, writes Mike McCahill.

Police procedurals are very much in vogue, but the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest – a notable critical and commercial smash earlier this year – reinvents the form from the inside out. The title and running time of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia establish certain expectations: of something epic, ruminative, serious-minded. These it certainly is, yet this philosophic procedural also proves disarmingly funny, in a way you perhaps wouldn’t expect from the filmmaker behind the solemn Uzak and Climates: sitting close to its centre is a droll joke about habeas corpus, or the absence thereof.

We’ve been dispatched on a dusk-till-dawn drive through the remote Anatolian countryside alongside several individuals caught up in a murder investigation. This investigation, like the film, is going nowhere fast. No-one can find the body for starters. One recurring hitch is that – for all Ceylan’s unrivalled expertise at photographing landscapes – in the dark, one hillock looks much the same as another. Matters turn farcical. Several coppers wet their socks in streams; names are repeatedly mispronounced.

The mute permanence of the countryside contrasts with the triviality of the chat, the life-and-death importance of the assignment with the essential cluelessness of those undertaking it. As the cortege progresses, topographic twists and turns come to be matched by those in the stories told by the variously lined, wistful or shattered men. Even here, the film makes appreciable distinctions: between the cops’ brute-force incompetence, the suspect’s silence, the medical examiner’s calm rationality, and the prosecutor’s openness to the uncanny.

These players draw us into not just a complete universe, but its specific time scheme: we’re left feeling as though we’ve also been up all night, witnessing something of what it is to be at the mercy of others. Ceylan has been promising much for several years now, but here he’s surpassed himself. In this extraordinary autopsy of the human condition, even the mid-film drinks break – a pause at a rural encampment, where the chief’s beautiful daughter brings these journeymen light and succour – is mysterious, somehow profound, and the very essence of cinema.

Mike McCahill on 18th June 2012
Author of 215 reviews