Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey, born 1959)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)

(This review was written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century and does not necessarily read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Well, I don’t know about this one.

Again we are presented with a film that belongs firmly and squarely in the realms of the arthouse, with no hope, and apparently no intention, of ever finding traction with a conventional mainstream audience. Again we are presented with long, long, slow takes and gaping silences. But for the first time since I started these reviews, I came to the end of this film and did not really feel that there was any significant payoff.

Like Leviathan, a great many details are never revealed to the viewer and are simply left to the ether. Unlike Leviathan, I wasn’t sure that this approach worked. With these supposedly extraneous details excised, I’m not convinced that what’s left is enough. Like Fish Tank, the film runs entirely on its own whims and at its own rhythm, which is stately to say the least. Unlike Fish Tank, I’m left feeling rather empty- unfulfilled, slightly numb, and not particularly moved or affected one way or the other.

If I was to speak non-critically about the film, I would say the execution was crisp, the technical aspects superb and the acting strong and effective. The film is a snapshot- taking place over a single night and the following morning, a timeframe of about 12 hours. There is, then, not much room for character development, even with strong actors. Consequently I found the film dry and deeply elusive. In an ensemble cast, one character emerges in the latter stages as our focal point, and he is stoic to the point of complete impenetrability. There are times when tension and atmosphere seem to build, but they don’t, to my mind, ultimately lead anywhere.

In an echo of The Assassination of Jesse James, much of this film takes place in vast expanses of sweeping, featureless landscape, a village dotted here and there. A group of men have been thrown together, this time on the right side of the law and holding positions with high amounts of societal respect. They converse. They banter. They bicker a little. These men are not itinerants, but in another life, they could be, and despite their clearly-defined goal, their movements carry with them an air of abjection and aimlessness. With one crucial offscreen exception, women exist only to have their beauty commented on and to identify their husbands’ corpses. This is not to say that it is a misogynist film- it isn’t, as far as I can see, but it is one which deals heavily, almost exclusively, with masculine concerns. At least three of these men have a wealth of great unhappiness weighing down the backgrounds of their lives, mostly only hinted at, and this unhappiness follows them everywhere, even out to the windswept Anatolian steppes in the dead of night, when they are working, and cannot possibly be confronted or expunged, only accepted. They deal with their feelings in different ways. As mentioned earlier, Doctor Cemal, ‘stoic to the point of complete impenetrability’, is unfailingly calm and pensive. Commissar Nasi is far more willing to let his vexations get the better of him- he tries to be restrained, and temperate, but frequently fails. And Prosecutor Nusret falls somewhere between these two sensibilities- he appears to go about his business with assurance and capability, the consummate professional- but in what was, for me, the film’s most powerful scene, he is unable to see out the night without breaking, without letting his façade slip. His burden is the heaviest of the three.

You will, without any shadow of a doubt, have seen worse films. I have seen much worse films than this. But I don’t feel I can, in all honesty, recommend it. Certainly not with any enthusiasm or fervour, anyway. It just didn’t do it for me. I don’t understand why Ceylan insisted on so many lingering silences. And it was in the film’s perplexing denouement that I felt most frustration and disappointment. I had hoped the final 20 minutes might bring clarity and closure, and instead the complete opposite occurred.

A strange one.

Revision:

I wrote that review on Saturday night (Feb 22, 2021), and it’s now Monday evening. I thought about the film quite a lot at work today, so it’s evident that I can no longer say I was ‘not particularly moved or affected one way or another’, and instead the movie had taken longer to seep in than I had initially realised or necessarily cared to admit. I still can’t say I like the film, but I think it runs along the same sort of arid, uneasy and thoroughly unforgiving lines as No Country for Old Men, a film I similarly struggled to process, let alone enthuse about.

My assertions that the movie didn’t go anywhere I also feel may be ill-founded. It doesn’t go anywhere in the traditional narrative sense, to be sure, but it’s now clear that the film, which has a relatively light first hour, descends, or perhaps even devolves, into a chronicle of crushing existential despair.

Why didn’t I see this on Saturday night? I think I have a certain resistance to extremely austere existentialism when it takes the form of apparent pointlessness and disorder, which is of course the basis for whole schools of philosophical thought. Put quite simply, I don’t like the way they make me feel. At all. I think I tried to use this an excuse for giving the film an unenthusiastic review and implying that it is a substandard movie; it isn’t, just an unusual one which made no clear attempt to entertain me or enrich my life in any way. It wanted me to feel numb at the end. It wanted me to feel perplexed and out-of-sorts.

It wanted me to directly confront death.

Put simply, it is an art film through and through and through, very pointedly not entertainment, perhaps more so than any of the films I have reviewed thus far, and more so than No Country for Old Men, which stars famous Hollywood actors, features far more incident, and is more ‘crowd-pleasing’ all round. It is also more ‘real’ than that film, with all apparent allegory stripped away. From what I can see, it is uncompromisingly, unrelentingly real. Quite pointedly, there is no music in it. Real life simply doesn’t feature non-diegetic music, so Once Upon a Time in Anatolia doesn’t either, not even over its closing credits.

Winter Sleep (2014)

Nuri Bilge Ceylan seems to fit into this category too, carrying the torch, seemingly, for a ‘cinema of pessimism’ also practiced by Michael Haneke, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Paweł Pawlikowski, Lars von Trier and- most obviously- Béla Tarr. That’s not to say that all of these filmmakers think and feel the same way- it’s pretty clear that they don’t- and neither is it to necessarily say that Ceylan sees the future as a black hole. But these filmmakers, to put it bluntly, are all about the ‘doom and gloom’ of our existence- as far as I can see, good things never happen in any of their movies, and if they did, they would be mere set-up for some awful downfall or disappointment.

Sometimes these movies are also extremely beautiful, and while Winter Sleep is not quite as aesthetically breathtaking as, for instance, Pawlikowski’s Cold War (few films are), its chilly visions of a pastel-coloured stone hotel cut into the side of a Turkish mountain, covered in snow and seemingly miles from anywhere, are beautiful too; perhaps reminiscent of Claire Denis’s White Material in its portrayal of a landscape which is both magnificent and frighteningly hostile.

Where Winter Sleep fits along the spectrum of this ‘cinema of pessimism’ is that it is a dour and downbeat experience without being particularly harrowing. It’s a slow burner. The tragedies that occur in Winter Sleep are at a smaller scale than the hair-raising White Material, or, for instance, von Trier’s Melancholia or Dancer in the Dark- or, for that matter, Ceylan’s own Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. The ‘doom and gloom’ presented here is in an entirely different guise, centred around interpersonal crises, differences of opinion, festering resentments, and ultimately some striking, unwanted realisations about oneself and the cold, hard world that one inhabits. Put more simply, this is a film about a small group of cohabiters who don’t get on. They are an aging former theatre actor, hotel owner and landlord called Aydin, his divorced sister who now lives in this hotel through reluctant ‘necessity’ and pines for her old life, and Aydin’s much younger wife. That they live in a dwelling large enough to avoid each other much of the time only makes the situation marginally better.

Central to these problems, apparently, is Aydin himself (Halik Bilginer in an exceptional performance), the self-styled emperor of this domain, who doesn’t actively avoid his wife or sister or tell them to leave him alone and doesn’t see why they should ever do or say these things to him. He seems okay at the start of the film- reasonable, even, and temperate. But self-serving hubris which is relatively controlled and contained is still self-serving hubris. Other problems are suggested along with Aydin’s exasperating personality. Can a workable relationship be forged, for example, when a woman is not merely married to a man who is old enough to be her father, but comfortably old enough to be her father, and then some? If the man has no kids of his own, as looks to be the case with Aydin, does that make it even more likely- if not unavoidable- that the relationship will slip into a discordant father-daughter dynamic?

These are the sorts of questions that Winter Sleep poses, and as is de rigeur for artistic films of this quality, there are no answers, and it’s left to you to figure it all out. It’s possible for two audience members to draw different conclusions and for neither of them to be wrong, though one imagines that a negative view of Aydin is nigh-on inevitable. Personally, I didn’t think his wife or sister came out of it all that great either. Why, exactly, did Nihal marry him? It appears to be so that she could have financial security, and so that she could also use his money for altruistic pursuits. Fine. One might argue, though, that having consciously made this decision, albeit at quite a young age, she should be willing to put up with a certain amount of interfering and commandeering from her husband/patron, as long as it does not turn abusive. She should not organise functions in his own house without telling him, and ask him to leave when he unexpectedly turns up. Though we see nothing of their past, it does not appear she has ever loved him and it looks like marrying him was mercenary and tactical on her part, veiled by charitable activism and a demeanour of unimpeachable kindness and civility. His sister, meanwhile, who doesn’t work and just mooches around the house reading magazines, sees fit to breeze into the private cabin he uses as a study, away from the hotel where he’s not bothering anyone, and sit herself down and start casually criticising his life, his career, and the newspaper columns he writes.

Aydin’s undeniable sin is pride. He is very cultured- probably more cultured than anyone else that he meets in this film, and he expects them all to take it into account when they interact with him. He sees himself as more sage than they do. Life, of course, isn’t like that, and people are not fine-tuned to focus on how sage you are, especially when their primary concern is how they are going to pay the next bill and how they are going to keep a roof over their family’s head. Why should they realistically care if you used to be a respected theatrical performer? That’s not necessarily to say that they won’t- if they happen to be a fan of theatre, that is, and they already know your name and maybe remember some of your performances. But among the general populace, this will all likely mean very little, especially if you have not successfully kept your arrogance and self-satisfaction to a socially acceptable level.

In a nutshell? You’re not as important as you think you are. Not even in your little fiefdom. Not even if you happen to own most of the property in your village. If you died tomorrow, everyone would just wonder who the next rent collector was going to be, and if they were about to raise the tariff. Brad Pitt’s O’Brien learnt very similar lessons- sort of, in a roundabout, extremely reluctant way- in The Tree of Life. At the age of around 60, Aydin should already know this stuff by now, and the fact that it has taken him this long is perhaps his- and the film’s- most prevailing tragedy. As the film comes to its powerful conclusion, Aydin cuts the same kind of figure that Cassavetes cut at the end of Husbands- a man adrift, alienated and actively disliked by his spouse, with no redemption in sight and no obvious way out of his predicament.

I liked this one a lot. It had the air of a masterpiece- scripted, filmed and acted with a meticulousness and intellectual rigorousness that commanded the screen. On one level, it is the complete opposite of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia; not only are there no lingering silences- not one- but it is, in fact, one of the talkiest films you are ever likely to see, with its massive 195-minute runtime filled to the brim with dialogue from beginning to end. Despite its mordant tone and intimidating length, it is a decidedly easier watch than the crushing 2011 think-piece, and instils in me a far more positive attitude towards taking on Ceylan’s remaining filmography.

From my so-far small sampling of his work, it would seem Zvyagintsev is his closest contemporary. There appears to be a certain ‘romance’ to Pawlikowski’s oeuvre- a bleak, doomed romance, to be sure, but romance nonetheless, and a sense of poignancy- that is absent from the harsh, brittle and defiantly unsentimental visions of both Ceylan and Zvyagintsev. In any case, this highly stimulating, premium-quality piece gets a big thumbs-up from me. Great stuff.