In the Flesh: Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Patreon)

The first hour and a half of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is a dream, a long dark night of the soul in which a group of rural Turkish police try to find a dead man’s body with the guidance of his killer, the guilt-wracked and disoriented Kenan (Fırat Tanış), who was drunk at the time of the murder. Ceylan captures the Anatolian countryside in stunning detail, making expert use of harsh lighting both natural and artificial to give the landscape a subtle feeling of hyperreality. The contrast between the impenetrable blackness of night and narrow strips of visible field and hillside where every blade of grass and knot on the trunk of a tree is picked out in stark detail has a mesmerizing effect. Ceylan’s facility for blocking and framing ensures even the most workaday shots of cars driving at night or the gate leading to a rural village are afforded the enigmatic gravity of fairy tale castles, and his lingering close-ups use scarves, windows, and other subtle facial blocking to carve actors’ faces into obscure shapes. The film’s very first shot is through a smeared and dirty window, the room and figures beyond it slowly dewing out of amorphous ambiguity.

Then, without ceremony, the dream ends. Morning slams into the film like a freight train and suddenly the whole world is details and hierarchies, reports and jurisdictional rulings. Coming just after Kenan’s vision of his victim Yaşar (Erol Erarslan) and the silent, beatific appearance of village mayor Muhtar’s ( Ercan Kesal) daughter Cemile (Cansu Demirci), this reversion signals a massive aesthetic and tonal shift. In excruciating detail Ceylan walks us through the processing, transport, identification, and autopsy of Yaşar’s body. We watch the sleep-deprived search party accidentally expose Kenan to a bloodthirsty crowd, leading to his being struck by a stone thrown by his own unknowing bastard son, the purported cause of the fight that led to Yaşar’s death. There’s an almost Biblical import to it. The staggering vistas of barren nature cloaked in darkness give way to more traditional scenes of urban bustle and infrastructure, gorgeous overheads giving us a sense that while we might have stepped outside this system for a moment into something a little wilder and more mysterious, by daylight it is inescapable.

Muhammet Uzuner anchors this final leg of the film as the almost preposterously handsome Doctor Cemal, a weary divorcee charged with overseeing Yaşar’s autopsy. After spending the entire film as our voice of reason and science, pushing back against the superstitions of district prosecutor Nusret (Taner Birsel), he finds himself unable to accept that Yaşar may have been buried alive, though whether intentionally or not we never discover. Instead, with the dead man’s blood crimson on his cheek, Cemal looks out the window of the morgue at Yaşar’s retreating wife and the son who may or may not be his, one of many uncertainties with which the film leaves us. The dirt in the dead man’s lungs belongs to the night, Ceylan seems to say. It can’t be understood by daylight.