'Once Upon A Time In Anatolia'

CSI, A La Turko

I don't watch a whole lot of movies from the middle east, I must admit. Truth be told, you have to actively go in search of them on SBS to find them so it is rare that a Turkish film ends up with a wider distribution than the usual suspect outlets. This one was on Fetch TV with a very high Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Spolier alert. It's a hard film to talk about without actually mentioning things that happen in it.

What's Good About It

It's good to see that film making in Turkey is more along the lines of Russian cinema and have little interest in building tension through the conventional shots. There's a lot of watching scenes unfold in wide shot and the closeups happen most unexpectedly. The style of the shooting lends itself to the meandering of the characters. It also obscures the sense of genre conventions so you're not quite sure how to interpret what you're seeing. In other words, it makes you think and gives you time to think about what you are witnessing. It's very good cinema that way.

It's also great to be wandering around the rural Anatolian hills with these characters because I figure I'll never have to go looking there as a tourist, thanks to this movie. The landscape is rendered lovingly and you get the full bleakness of the place.

Nothing is glamorous, nothing is grandiose or made to be aesthetically pleasing. There is a stick in the mud social realism that runs through the film that would make legions of film critics delighted. The performances are understated, yet filled with emotional commitment - even the guys playing the dullest tools in the box carry so much commitment. It's simply a great film to watch.

What's Bad About It

Can't think of anything bad about it. It is somewhat dissatisfying in not knowing what actually happened in the beginning. The film skips the central crime while going on a dark odyssey through the night to find the corpse from the crime. We never get to find out how the crime took place or what the motive might have been. We only get fragments to piece together but they are so ambiguous, it's nearly impossible to construct a narrative that makes sense.

It is the way the film should be, in some ways, but in another way, I'm left wondering if crimes are so common place in Turkey they've stopped asking why. I'm not asking for closure in the Hollywood movie sense, but I think they might have offered a glimpse of the police interrogation that led to the trip through the night. So much of it is gleaned through dialogue that it renders the film almost un-cinematic when it comes to the central crime in the film.

What's Interesting About it

The film is like a cross between 'CSI' and 'Waiting for Godot'. The whole film is like a metaphor for life, where a bunch of guys thrown together by fate and the whim of bureaucracy get in 3 cars looking for a buried corpse in the Anatolian hills. As one of the oldest locations for human civilisation, the place is freaky to look at as it is. It hardly has any trees, hardly an animal grazing and the soil looks tired and worn. Once upon a time it was covered in forests and one of the most verdant places on the planet. Denuded, the landscape is haunting and strange.

The film makes reference to the layered history of the land when the doctor goes off track to urinate, and comes across an ancient statue. It's like something straight out of Peter Jackson's Tolkien book movies, but much less dramatic. It gives the sense that people in Anatolia are living amongst the ruins.

The Modernist Angst

The Modernist Anxiety is well and truly alive in this film. The characters are bothered deeply by the process they are enduring. Professionally they are bound to be on this trek but on a personal level they would rather be somewhere else. The anxiety bursts through when they realise at certain points that bureaucratic duties require men better equipped than themselves. The anxiety is mainly to do with human fallibility and the unlikeliness of living up to the demands of bureaucracy.

Some of this manifests itself as very uncomfortable black comedy as they eventually uncover the corpse. The scene with the corpse and trying to bring it back to the city is hilarious. The mayor negotiating for funding is equally interminable and rambling. It is like a special revenge for imposing upon his village. As the audience, we're forced to endure his pitch for funding a morgue as well. It's funny and sad, tedious and curious, all in one long speech. A memento mori moment for all the characters.

It doesn't get more existential than driving around a haunted barren landscape in search of a corpse in the middle of the night. It's a metonymy for the condition of man - the corpse they find is in a sense their own meaningless deaths and by extension their current meaningless lives. In Turkey, it's not some radioactive monster that comes and smashes you; it's the weight of history and one's insignificance in light of it that smashes you.

Absent Lovers

For a film filled with guys bumbling around in the dark and police officers and soldiers at that, the film is rather un-macho. The men in it are not only haunted by where they are and what their jobs makes them do, but also by some in their lives. The principal men in this film are essentially walking around in the aftermath of their own catastrophic love. Femininity only appears as a glimpse, ever mysterious and largely silent. Women don't seem to get a whole lot of say in Turkish society and their own response to this is suicide. It's pretty poignant that the men barely have a grip on their own lives. Women appear to these characters as phenomena, rather than human beings.