Once Upon a Time in Anatolia Archives

Seattle Screens: Mysteries of ‘Anatolia’

Not up for the American Reunion of the Pie-pals of the sex-comedy series? There’s plenty of alternatives arriving this week, including Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s mesmerizing Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Joseph Cedar’s Oscar-nominated Footnote from Israel, and revivals of the classics Laura and North by Northwest.

“The best films I saw during my week at the Vancouver Film Festival were Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Béla Tarr’s incomparable The Turin Horse,” wrote Kathleen Murphy a few months ago. “Both ran two hours plus. The storytelling in the former unreels slowly, cumulatively, so mysteriously that if you don’t watch with intense concentration, you’ll miss moments when everything racks focus. The narrative in Tarr’s masterpiece is terrifyingly repetitive and monotonous, in the Beckettian sense, like a great engine grinding itself ever deeper into a hole, in circular slow motion that you fear might go on forever.”

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia arrives in Seattle this week for a week-long run at Northwest Film Forum (followed in a couple of weeks by The Turin Horse) and it is a mesmerizing film where, by Hollywood standards, nothing happens, and yet everything happens along the way of this hyper-real and dreamily surreal take on the police procedural in the middle of nowhere. In the words of Ms. Murphy: “as this strange, tedious drive toward a hole in the ground continues, Anatolia drifts out of the mundane into the mystical, invisibly morphing from police procedural into existential fairy tale.” Read her complete review on Parallax View here, and for more, read Robert Horton’s review at The Herald here.

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Expect Anatolia to be a topic of conversation in this month’s round of “Framing Pictures” at NWFF this Friday, April 6. Join Seattle film critics and Parallax View contributors Robert Horton, Richard T. Jameson, and Kathleen Murphy for a discussion of the movies of the moment and of the ages. According to the website, “On April 6, we talk about current Northwest Film Forum screenings including Laura and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, and also the wider critical response to The Hunger Games.” Richard Jameson describes it into his own inimitable way at Straight Shooting. Starts at 5pm at NWFF, and it’s free.

VIFF Dispatch No. 6: ‘What is this darkness?’

The best films I saw during my week at the Vancouver Film Festival were Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and Béla Tarr’s incomparable The Turin Horse. Both ran two hours plus. The storytelling in the former unreels slowly, cumulatively, so mysteriously that if you don’t watch with intense concentration, you’ll miss moments when everything racks focus. The narrative in Tarr’s masterpiece is terrifyingly repetitive and monotonous, in the Beckettian sense, like a great engine grinding itself ever deeper into a hole, in circular slow motion that you fear might go on forever.

And, yes, each movie was mesmerizing, formally stunning in its exposure of the human condition. These are works that show us the skull beneath every skin, the darkness that threatens all our light, and the absurdity of our strivings to signify. I know what you’re saying: Why would I want to sit through such downers, deliberate excursions into angst and despair? My answer is always the same: How can you not? What would a thinking person do without artists like Tarr or Ceylan or Shakespeare or Goya who challenge futility and chaos by framing and composing every cause of existential hopelessness? Even nihilism can be shaped into story, made beautifully and truthfully subject to mind. Stories like Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and The Turin Horse (count Lars von Trier’s Melancholia in this company) keep us alive and sane. Call them spiritual sustenance.

Sadly, long, challenging films like these will never garner larger auds after their festival showcases. That’s the tragedy of film as art, or art as film: the more it’s art, the less it will be seen. Both movies should have pride of place on any critic’s Ten Best List this year. But what would be the context for sharing such a list? Who would even recognize these titles?

The first framed image in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is seen through a dirty window pane: a blear of yellow light slowly resolves to show three comrades hunkered down for the night in a truckstop oasis, drinking, talking, laughing. Those are the stylistic elements that define the long pilgrimage that follows: darkness mitigated by camaraderie and revelations amid pools of golden light. This stylistic formalism recalls Howard Hawks, who brings his beleaguered communities into circles of light where friendship, music, and professional skill are often the only hedges against oblivion.