A procedural in which truth ultimately matters less than the lost souls who seek it, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” opens, like so many of the arthouse classics that inspired it, with a search for something. Here it's the body of a man, whose murderer is in fact among those in the search party, treking across the Turkish countryside in the middle of the night to uncover the corpse for a case against him. As in “Police, Adjective,” a Romanian new wave anti-thriller with which 'Anatolia' shares its pervading sensibility, what begins as a straight-forward procedural quickly becomes a metaphysical inquiry, and this dimension is the film’s most appealing: Ceylan strains to glean slivers of spiritual import from every mundane glance or gesture, and in his hands even ordinary details seem to take on mystical properties—swaths of light look portentous, anecdotes suggest more than they might mean, everything and everyone feels displaced. In short, it’s a murder-case movie as lucid as poetry.

'Anatolia' wears its aesthetic and thematic influences on its sleeve, but it’s hard to fault Ceylan of plagiarism when his omnivorous tastes are synthesized so well. Since it shared the Grand Prix with the Dardenne brothers’ “The Kid with a Bike” at Cannes last May, 'Anatolia' has collected innumerable comparisons to Abbas Kiarostami’s “Taste of Cherry.” About as narratively spare as Ceylan’s film, Kiarostami's likewise frames its drive through Middle Eastern hillsides as a quest with deeply philosophical implications, but the two films have little in common stylistically. Kiarostami is a perceptive and provocative thinker, but he tends to favor a minimalist aesthetic that borders on naturalism; even when his films veer into self-reflexivity and experimentation, they maintain the look and feel of an almost documentary-style realism (and often this ostensible realism is part of the point his films are trying to make). 'Anatolia,' on the other hand, is practically painterly, its compositions impeccably crafted and its use of color and lighting expressive rather than naturalistic. The film’s first half, in particular, looks exceptionally gorgeous, and though its beauty seems more understated once the inky nighttime blacks are replaced by the softer palettes of dawn, 'Anatolia' is stunning throughout. It may be a film of ideas, but one of its most impressive qualities is how nice it is to look at.

Aestheticizing philosophy so boldly is uncommon, but Ceylan’s not exactly a pioneer in this regard, either; his project recalls sustained efforts by Michelangelo Antonioni to do something similar with thought and atmosphere in the late '60s and early '70s. Antonioni's groundbreaking “L’Avventura,” driven by a narrative mystery left deliberately unsolved, seems the most obvious predecessor to this kind of quasi-existential theatre, and one might accurately trace its origins (of a sensibility more than a style or genre) to the question at the heart of that film. I’d argue that the depth of this sort of inquiry piqued with “The Passenger” in 1975, and more than any other film this strikes me as the one most similar to 'Anatolia' in both style and concept. Like 'Anatolia,' “The Passenger” begins with a set-up which resembles a conventional mystery, but from there its interests shift away from the particulars of the case and toward a deeper understanding of the greater context—of the instability of identity, man’s capacity for goodness and evil, and of the nature of truth. And all of it’s shot with the eye of an artist. 

It’s tempting to criticize a film this overtly aestheticized for privileging style over substance, but 'Anatolia' ultimately proves deeper and more rewarding than a simplistic formal exercise. It’s true that its silences are conspicuous, and, like “Taste of Cherry,” what it elides often outweighs what’s explicated. But what is said is allowed to sink in, the implications reverberating, and information which might have seemed benign instead hangs heavy with meaning. After the aforementioned body has been found and the criminal brought back for prosecution, our characters carry on living, and we follow. The film could have ended earlier, once the case had been closed and mystery more or less solved (as far as finding the body “solves” anything, of course; the film suggests it might not). But it continues well past the point of expectation with an extended denouement involving an autopsy—one which may raise more questions than it answers. The point isn’t to provide any revelation or sense of closure; the point, in fact, seems the opposite, to provide a sense that the mystery was never central to begin with. With the proper question undermined, 'Anatolia' is free to ask the questions which really matter, questions that involve these characters and their lives, what brought them here and where they’ll go.

Review by:
Calum Marsh