newjerseynewsroom.com

BY MIRIAM RINN

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

MOVIE REVIEW

Some movies test the endurance of even the most patient viewer and yet turn out to be worth the effort. “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” co-written and directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylon, may be one of those, but I’m not convinced.

It’s certainly received a lot of praise--the movie shared the Grand Prix at Cannes, was a selection at the New York Film Festival, and Turkey has submitted it to the Academy Awards for best foreign-language film. All this, despite a 150-minute running time and glacial pacing. Actually, the glaciers are melting more rapidly.

The film opens at dusk on the wild steppes of Anatolia, a brooding landscape of rolling hills and narrow winding roads. A group of men pile into several cars and set out to find a body. The group includes a doctor, a prosecutor, several detectives and police officers, a bunch of manual laborers, and two brothers suspected of murder. One of the brothers thinks he remembers where he buried a body and directs the convoy to one spot after another.

At each stop, the laborers pile out and start to dig. When they discover nothing, the cars load up again, head to the next stop, and then the next. This goes on for about 45 minutes, with desultory conversation amongst the men about different topics--adultery, office politics, the appeal/repulsion of the rural steppes, suicide, and a protracted discussion about yogurt. It’s a long slog, and the viewer feels the boredom and frustration of the men as each stop results in disappointment--or maybe that‘s our own boredom and frustration. We’re talking about three-quarters of an hour with nothing happening, after all.

Almost the entire movie is filmed at night, with dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, mostly aimed at the doctor, who is the film’s point of view character. He is a mysterious figure about whom we discover more through flashbacks, including why he is willing to stay in such a remote, rural location. But this is not a character study in the conventional sense, unless it is the character of the locality, an isolated area dotted with poor villages and the small-town intrigues they engender. The still camera work in wide screen emphasizes the vast distances between houses, and perhaps between the people, too. This is an ancient place, we feel, which keeps its secrets.

As dawn approaches, the party gets hungry and stops at a village elder’s to eat. The elder takes the value of hospitality seriously, as well as his connections to some of the officials, and the household arises to prepare a full meal for the guests. The old man’s youngest daughter slips in and out to serve, which leads to some talk about women, sexuality, and honor. Although we see the girl, she says nothing, and that in itself tells a story. The film is peopled almost exclusively with men, and although they talk about the women in their lives, at time with deep feeling, those women hardly appear.