Europe Endless - The Mediterranean: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Dir Nuri Bilge Ceylan , 2h37m, 2011)

We have crossed backwards and forward in time and space as we travel across Europe. We have rarely seen a pattern in European cinema - yes, there is a preponderance towards naturalism, towards the verité in the films we have considered so far, but cinema has long been as much about realism as it is about telling stories. This final leg of our journey will take us from one side of Europe to the other, from the Bosphorus to the Straits of Gibraltar, as we consider the cinemas of the Mediterranean. Yet, for all the distance travelled between our last stop in Bucharest in the heart of Romania, and this cinematic expedition into rural Anatolia, we must once again consider slow cinema, at the hands of one of its master craftsmen, Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan, as a single night unites a group of men hunting for the body of a murder victim, who find much more than this.

Whilst many of the countries we have visited so far can narrow the birth of their nascent cinematic cultures down to a couple of cities, and a handful of men, Turkey can arguably do better: theirs is a medium honed on a single street in Istanbul, the nigh-legendary Yeşilçam Street; its heyday between the 1950s and 1970s saw Turkish film production reach two to three hundred films a year, although by the end of the 1980s, television and political unrest had caused film production to drop to two or three films a year. Into this enters a number of film-makers, many of whom, like Zeki Demirkubuz, Yeşim Ustaoğlu and Derviş Zaim, used their filmmaking to match realism with a deeply political focus. Nuri Bilge Ceylan comes, compared to this cohort, from a background as an actor and photographer, but quickly left his mark on European cinema with his short film, Cocoon (Koza) and his full-length feature debut, Kasaba (The Small Town, 1997), his body of work quickly collecting Cannes wins and Oscar shortlisting nominations.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia has a surprising amount of shared ground with last week's Aurora (dir. Cristi Puiu, 2010): both are crime films, Anatolia not even depicting the brutal murder at its heart, but picking up after the event and the confession of the suspects Kenan (Fırat Tanış) and his brother, Ramazan (Burhan Yıldız), as the two of them are escorted by the local police, the pompous prosecutor (Taner Birsel) who at one point compares himself to Clark Gable, and the local doctor, Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner) to try and locate the body. Both are films that make much of their long takes - Anatolia's opening shot is a nearly three minute held shot, depicting the murderers and their victim, Yaşar drinking at his workplace, the only camera movement the pullback as Yaşar gets to his feet, coming into focus from behind the grubby glass, and the film's first cut doesn't come till another thirty or so seconds later, to a beautifully framed shot of the entire garage, the previous shot now framed in it. 

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a film full of beautiful shots: Gökhan Tiryaki's cinematography makes much of the film being largely set at night, from landscapes across which the headlights of cars, stationary and moving, cut, to the interior of these cars - there is a repeated shot of the police - Naci (Yılmaz Erdoğan) and his driver Arap Ali (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), Cemal, and Kenan, the four of them, a tableaux that the film returns to again and again, the faces moving in and our of shadow. Each frame of these sequences, and many besides, from the stunningly beautiful shots of cornfields, moving in the breeze in the glare of vehicle lights, to faces illuminated by lamplight, are cinematic paintings; their heavy use of chiaroscuro call to mind the Italian Renaissance, the sensibility of the paintings of Caravaggio recreated, recaptured a thousand miles east and several hundred years later - the beauty of the wildness of Anatolia is not lost on Cemal, who, during one of these sequences, quotes poetry, contemplating their ephemerality against the landscape.

The film's best shot is not of the countryside of Anatolia, but a young woman: she is encountered in a nearly twenty minute sequence in the centre of the film where the investigation team are hosted by a local village, the sequence focusing on a discussion about the town's morgue. Into this comes the mayor's daughter, lit only by candlelight - her appearance is not only striking for audiences, but we also see Kenan, the man whose violence has brought them out into the wilderness, visibly moved by her appearance. It is also at this point that women enter the narrative of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. There are three female characters present in its narrative, the daughter being the first, the wife of the murdered Yasar, Gülnaz (Nihan Okutucu) who has to identify the body of her husband, the film's final sequences a static, almost voyeuristic shot from a window of the bereaved woman and her son slowly departing into the distance  with the dead man's possessions.

Yet, throughout the film's narrative, a third woman, dying in mysterious circumstances but largely forgotten in comparison to the manhunt for Yasar's body - in short, she haunts the narrative, emblematic, whether Ceylan deliberately intended to focus on this theme or, not the differing status of women and men in rural Turkey or otherwise. His later films, in particular 2014's Winter Sleep, certainly consider the disparity between rich and poor, and for all their scale and beautiful shots, they are films that observe, that depict, without embellishment, life and death in the countryside of Anatolia with the eye of a master painter and the narrative heft to rival any of his country's novelists. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a perfect introduction to his filmography in its tale of murder, justice, and those left behind. 

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is avaiable for streaming from AppleTV and available on DVD and BluRay from  ‎ New Wave Films

Next week onward to Greece as we consider Theo Angelopoulos' coming of age tale, Landscape in the Mist