I hate “Law and Order.” I hate how identical it feels week to week with its dense, ridiculous plots and minimal visual intrigue. It’s almost completely soiled me on crime procedurals.
But Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan has made a peculiar crime procedural by oddly making “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia’s” story more mundane and its artistry more remarkable.
It’s the story of a group of detectives out searching for a body after two men have confessed to a murder. They were drunk when they committed the act and can’t remember where the body is buried, so their search for it is intentionally slow and arduous.
But the entire time Ceylan transports us to another world full of darkly captivating natural splendor. The long, winding roads through the hilly Turkish countryside are painterly tapestries in the camera’s eyes, and Ceylan slowly glosses over them in deliberately expressive shots. So often he challenges us to scour the lush landscape, and we become enchanted by the subtle motion of cars rocketing like fireballs as they gracefully penetrate the image. Continue reading “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”