Once upon a Time in Anatolia
Ever experienced time stretch? What do I mean by ‘time stretch’? Well, as this is a running website; think about the first minute after you’ve pulled your guts out in the closing part of a race and think about the time it takes you to recover. The time on your watch will tell you that only a minute has gone by, whilst your heart is beating like a jackhammer; your breath comes in frantic gasps as you struggle to recover. The time in your head tells you, you’ve been suffering for ten minutes or more - that’s time stretch; or at least one version.
There’s other ways of experiencing time stretch - drop a tab of LSD or indulge yourself with too many tokes in too short a period and one of the effects can be cataleptic time stretch where, if you’re lucky enough, you’ll live through days of revelatory visions and when you drift back to normality, you’ll realise that only a couple of hours have gone by and you’ve not moved out of your seat - that’s another version of time stretch. This film provided me a third type of time stretch... and very wonderful it was too.
Films can do all sorts of things - at a very basic level they can tell a simple story; they can induce sympathy even empathy. They can raise your awareness, they can teach, they can entertain - occasionally they can make you angry. Sometimes they have the potential to wash over you and whilst not being life altering experiences, they can induce you to look at things a little differently, or appreciate a perspective you’ve not really considered before. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, a film becomes more than the sum of its parts and becomes something you ‘live’ through. All great art has these iconic artifacts - think of a great piece of music; a moving painting, or a fantastic book. The piece itself becomes more than the sum of it’s parts and becomes something greater... and quite often you cannot figure out why!? Why should piece of music ‘A’ move me to tears but piece of music ‘B’ have no effect at all - even though it’s by the same composer and just as well written? Sometimes, things are just magnificent and there’s no explanation needed beyond that.
So, the Film. Well, it’s a tale about a murder and the hunt for a body in the wild rural landscape of Anatolia. It’s about a team of state officials set on the case to unravel the tale of a dirty deed and it is; on the surface; a corpse hunt. Just below the surface it is much more than this and it’s a deep study of relationships and the complicated interactions between the characters. It’s an in-depth enquiry into each person’s motivation and character flaws upon their journey of discovery during the dark Anatolian night and it is brilliantly done.
The acting is superb - the cinematography better - it’s a film that’s beautifully shot and the mise en scene is perfect; the best I’ve experienced in a long time. Critically, some will consider the narrative slow moving and not much happening; to a certain extent this is true. However, that’s a bit like complaining that your sleigh ride through a Finnish forest in December wasn’t as good as your double ton on a Suzuki around Oulton Park - they both equally valid experiences of transport but completely different in their intent and so bear no comparison.
I found the film to be a hypnotic, enthralling and at times quite moving. It was also a fine example of ‘time stretch’ as leaving the theatre I wasn’t sure if I’d been 30 minutes or 24 hours.
My date thought it was:
‘Totally boring... I couldn’t tell one bloke in a mustache from another and boy it dragged on a bit - the director was on a complete arty farty wankfest’
10/10 - This years Pan’s Labyrinth... watch out for the Hollywood remake coming this way soon.
