Film critic Molly Haskell famously described 'The Godfather'
as "grandly mournful," a beautifully apt description. 'Once Upon a
Time in Anatolia' is just as mournful but without the grandeur.
It beats me why 'Anatolia' took second prize at Cannes last
year. But 2011 was a tough year in general for Cannes. Top prize went to
"The Tree of Life," which in my view was run-of-the-mill Buddhism
tarted up with kaleidoscopic visuals.
In my review of 'Tree,' I described it as a bloated
over-statement. I'd describe 'Anatolia' as a bloated non-statement. If it can
be imagined, 'Anatolia' has even fewer original ideas than 'Tree.' And Cannes
was all aflutter over these two films? It must have been a very undistinguished
group of films in competition last year.
'Anatolia' is a long, slow, boring dirge. Turkish filmmaker
Nuri Ceylan, who has a very good reputation among serious cinephiles (but this
is the first Ceylan film I have seen), takes a bunch of middle-aged male actors
out to the remote, frighteningly barren countryside of Turkey in the middle of
the night and follows them around with his camera as they amble about in a
sleep-deprived stupor.
They are playing policemen on a murder investigation. Why
they are conducting an investigation in the middle of the night is never
explained. Their caravan of broken-down vehicles pulls up to one barren
location after the next, and all the men look around the ground for clues. Most
of them are overweight, semi-educated imbeciles -- peasants with a high school
diploma. The only one with real intelligence is a doctor, who inexplicably is
along for the ride.
That doctor becomes the heart of the movie, and gradually he
does emerge as a slightly interesting character. But only slightly. He, like
all the other characters, has nothing to do, so his character can only be
contemplated in the abstract.
In the last half-hour of this overly long film
(two-and-a-half hours), I started to feel that Ceylan was a true artist.
Probably only a minor one, but a true one. He does have something mournful to
say about life and about people that is genuinely artistic. I just don't think
he captured his artistic viewpoint very effectively here, either in the writing
of the script or the directing of the film shoot.
The cinematography, art direction, and editing is
consistently pedestrian. My hunch is that he consciously chose a flat style --
flat neo-realist style is very popular in high-art cinema these days (see also
Iran's "A Separation," which has become such an art-house hit in
America and is likely to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Film). But I don't
think the flat pedestrian filmmaking style served Ceylan's purpose at all. I
can appreciate that he wanted to portray his characters as mind-numbingly
boring and flat. But when the man behind the camera starts to seem
mind-numbingly boring and flat, something has gone wrong -- at least for me.
But I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to see a film
like this in a theater. Even when high art doesn't completely work, it's still
enriching. Thank you to Cinema Guild (a microscopically small New York-based
distributor) for giving New Yorkers the chance to see 'Anatolia.' It is
becoming increasingly rare for high-art cinema to make it to American shores --
a very troublesome development. That's why it's crucial for New Yorkers to get
out of their apartments and see films like this in a theater. We've got to keep
the market for high-art cinema alive. If Cinema Guild is going to shell out
half-a-million dollars to bring a film like this to our shores, let's at least help them earn back some of that money!
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