Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011, Nuri Bilge Ceylan) (Patreon)

48/100

Second viewing, up from 39, which while a significant bump by my standards still puts me, what, roughly 30-40 points below consensus? My report from Cannes '11 emphasized the film's needless bloat—"endless trudging and sniping and sharing of seemingly random anecdotes"—and the subsequent discursiveness of both Winter Sleep and The Wild Pear Tree just confirms my sense that Ceylan now uses duration as a signifier of Art, without really employing it to any good, specific end. Anatolia would be much stronger at 100 minutes or so, minus the conversations about buffalo yogurt and repeated requests to acquire a prescription for one's wife; I understand that these mundane interludes serve a function not unlike that of, say, Vincent and Jules discussing foot massages and TV pilots while preparing to murder people, but that approach gets stifling when it isn't actively amusing, and there's way more "in the midst of death we are in banality" here than necessary. (That's especially true once the sun rises and Ceylan can no longer compensate for the tedium with stunning headlight-lit landscape shots.) I did better appreciate this time the late one-two punch of the prosecutor grilling the doctor about the woman who mysteriously died, followed by the doc's decision to omit from his autopsy report evidence that the murder victim had been buried alive (clearly in response to his realization that the prosecutor had been talking about his own wife, and that bluntly stating the truth had only done harm). That decision doesn't feel like a culmination, though—just another element of a terminally vague dissertation on the mysteries of life and death. Apparently the story was inspired by actual events experienced by one of Ceylan's cowriters, so maybe Anatolia's formless sprawl stems from his inclusion of every detail that he vividly recalled, whether or not said detail contributes to a compact, coherent idea. In any case, I still find too little that actively engages me, and the form/content disjunction—first hour is 90% form, last hour 90% content, with a muddle in the middle—is unproductively severe. Well, at least I'm marginally less out of step with everyone else than I used to be.