Six features into his career, the Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan takes his most ambitious and deeply rewarding step forward yet with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, an epic procedural that doubles as an existential study in death and guilt, life and faith, science and law. The director, recovering hugely from his last feature, the interesting misstep Three Monkeys, begins the film with the three chief figures in a small crime, a bad murder that we never see and that is never really explained. Ceylan pushes through a grimy window to reveal a gaggle of friends enjoying some food and drinks: Kenan (Firat Tanis), Kenan's brother, and Yasar, the murder victim, whose corpse constitutes the film's rotting MacGuffin.
Following this brief but telling preamble, we are vaulted into the "tedious" search for Yasar's body in the titular countryside, a logjam constructed either on purpose or due to a few too many cocktails on Kenan's bill. There is a doctor, Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), and a prosecutor, Nusret (Taner Birsel), on hand to oversee the search for the body and also administer a quick ascertaining of the crime scene when the body is found. This tangential pursuit aside, they are all obviously in pursuit of the metaphysical, answers cloaked in and essentially made up of the emptiness of the hills, valleys, and tall green grass of Anatolia. Yasar's body isn't located until a little over two-third of the way through the film, and yet the doctor, the prosecutor, the lead investigator (a very good Yilmaz Erdogan), and even the investigator's bumbling subordinate (Ahmet Mumtaz Taylan) seem to be on the trail of some intangible crime that haunts their very life.
Ceylan has righly been compared to Antonioni in his use of "emptiness" and his fondness for big, widescreen landscapes that swallow up and impose on small figures in emotional crisis; the doomed marriage chronicled in Climates, the strained familial ties and perils of close cohabitation peered at in Distant. The rolling green hills of Ceylan's setting certainly offer beautiful, pensive imagery to accompany the beefy, faux-tough philosophical musings of the cops, the doctor, and the prosecutor. Yet, as the film progresses, the aesthetic seems more apropos of the villages and miles of primal hell where Sergio Leone set his Spaghetti Westerns, while the script, written by Ceylan, his wife Ebru, and Ercan Kesal suggests an unholy union of Sidney Lumet, Dick Wolf, and Samuel Beckett. Here, Ceylan's attempts to embrace genre and tighten his narrative grip pay off immensely by summoning both a tremendous black comedy and a haunting, cerebral study of the inner-workings of faith out of what is ostensibly the husk of a crime film.The Turkish filmmaker allows for plenty of masculine speeches about survival, death and tormented lifetimes, but it is telling that the centerpiece of the film centers on things of material need. Tired from searching, the prosecutor arranges for his caravan to stop for food, tea, and brief shelter at the farmhouse of a small village's mayor (Kesal). There, the mayor attempts to negotiate some federal funding for a new morgue, so that family and friends from surrounding territories and abroad can say goodbye to their deceased ones properly and carry out religious duties. The prosecutor is largely uncaring, more prone to compliment the man on his food and the beauty of his daughter. There is a profane, political rage at the heart of Ceylan's film that can be felt rumbling underneath throughout, but it truly radiates in scenes like this.
It would be easy to dismiss Ceylan as purposefully slow and overtly "artsy", and he certainly does enjoy his still landscape shots and zoom-ins of brush caught in a lick of wind. But here, he successfully fuses the ponderous nature of his imagery to some of the more familiar trappings of genre filmmaking, making one of the most exciting, pensive, and bizarre police procedurals in recent memory; we only witness one act of genuine violence and it involves little more than a quick beating. Clocking in at a little over two-and-a-half hours, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia ruminates and takes its time to do what Ceylan's camera does in the very first shot: locate the active inner life while focusing on the seemingly impermeable veneer.
