The Law Is a Ass

Bir zamanlar Anadolu’da (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) 2011 Turkey (157 minutes) directed and co-written by Nuri Bilge Ceylan; editor, Bora Göksingöl.

It was a dark and stormy night…

Before the title, a camera keeps its wary distance like a cat. It peeks through a dirty window to watch three men share food, drink, and friendly conversation after hours in a roadside tire repair shop. The road is an unlined two-laner in central Anatolia about 100 miles southeast of Ankara, Turkey.

After the title, one of these three men turns up haggard and unshaven in the back of a car between a police officer and the district coroner. The police commissioner and a driver are in the front seats. It is sunset, apparently several days after the opening scene.

The haggard man, Kenan (Firat Taniş), is a murder suspect. He is supposed to lead a detail of law enforcement officials to the roadside site where he buried a victim he has confessed to killing. The officials want to wrap up a long day and get home to dinner.

Police Commissioner Naci (Yilmaz Erdoğan), suspect Kenan (Firat Taniş) and Police Officer Izzet (Murat Kiliç) in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).

Kenan’s younger brother Ramazan (Burhan Yildiz), who had been with Kenan in the tire repair shop, is under guard in another vehicle in the detail. He is Kenan’s alleged accomplice. Throughout the film the third man, Yaşar Toprak (Erol Erarslan), the victim, reappears to the guilt-haunted Kenan like Banquo’s ghost.

As ‘police procedurals’ go, this movie is an outlier. It starts out as a cut-and-dried murder case; but the murder turns out to be peripheral to the atmosphere created by details of the main characters’ lives and what their stories and attitudes say about society, its laws and procedures.

Director Nuri Bilge Ceylan tells his story in the standing-around time investigations inevitably entail, which moviegoers and television viewers seldom see. The men’s back-and-forth is reminiscent of the banter in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), though less arty and with fewer pop culture references: ‘Like a Virgin’ becomes ‘like a fairy tale.’

‘Like a Virgin’ becomes ‘like a fairy tale’: Yilmaz Erdoğan, Muhammet Uzuner, Firat Taniş, Murat Kiliç and Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).

Central to the story are men’s difficult relationships with women. A wife’s affair may be behind the murder under investigation. The narrative carefully picks its way through details of the main characters’ fraught marital stories; it gets at the truth through conversation as this works in life, in told and admitted and inadvertent bits and pieces. The henpecked police commissioner’s ringtone from the theme of the film Love Story is a nice touch.

In the end, a carefully thought through, stylized script achieves the naturalness of what feels like ‘the real thing.’ The result is a subtle and beautifully rendered slice-of-life from the heartland of Turkey.

Dr. Cemal (Muhammet Uzuner), the coroner, provides Ceylan’s main narrative point of view. [In Turkish, c is pronounced like English j.] In the car with Dr. Cemal and the prime suspect Kenan are Police Commissioner Naci (Yilmaz Erdoğan), Police Officer Izzet (Murat Kiliç), and Police Officer Arab Ali (Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan), the commissioner’s driver.

Savcı Nusret (Taner Birsel), the public prosecutor and ranking official, leads the investigation. Nusret apparently came from Ankara at Naci’s request to handle the case. He is in the ‘courthouse’ car with a driver and two laborers with shovels detailed to disinter the buried corpse. Suspect Ramazan is in the gendarmerie jeep taking up the rear with a flashing roof light.

This three-vehicle detail of law enforcement officials tying up the loose ends of a murder case turns into three sets of headlights in the badlands in a night-long anabasis through the sleep-deprived memory of a less and less convincing suspect and the personal lives of the main characters.

A key scene takes place in the middle of the film, in the middle of the night, when the team, frustrated by the suspect’s dodgy memory but all drawing overtime pay, pulls into a rural village for an unplanned meal break.

The Muhtar (Ercan Kesal), or elected village elder, welcomes the team with open arms. The visit gives him a chance to lobby Nusret for public funds for the mortuary he says the village needs. During a brief power outage, the Muhtar’s lovely daughter Cemile (Cansu Demirci) appears to several of the men, lit by a kerosene lamp like a subject in a Georges de la Tour painting.

Before the meal break, the commissioner had been at the point of beating Kenan out of sheer exasperation. The suspect promised to take the team to where the body was buried, but he seems to have lost track of where that is. Naci suspects that Kenan is just another ‘cheap hood’ leading police on a wild sheep chase. But near the end of the break, Naci gets new information that changes his appreciation of the suspect and the case.

The tidy dimensions of the initial incident bleed slowly into a genuine tragedy that becomes impossible to fit within the four corners of published police procedure or reporting, charging documentation or an autopsy report. We see this at the end of the film when the doctor makes a judgment call in the autopsy room after watching the victim's wife and son leave the hospital after identifying the body.

The viewer watches Yaşar’s autopsy performed in the words and faces of Dr. Cemal, Sakir (Kubilay Tunçer) the autopsy technician, and the courthouse clerk Abidin (Safak Karali). The camera does not show the body; we see only the men’s facial expressions as Dr. Cemal directs Sakir and dictates his report. We hear Sakir’s cutting and the squish-squish. A drop of brown bodily fluid splashes on the doctor’s cheek.

The law may well be the ass Charles Dickens’s Mr. Bumble derides in Oliver Twist when its officers force its stubborn logic on humanity’s idiosyncrasies to achieve justice. At the same time, it becomes society’s beast of burden when charged with this ungainly task.

Despite the two-and-a-half hour runtime, there is no dead space—the shots tell a story without trying to impress us that THIS IS AN ART FILM. The story they tell engages one’s interest and bears more than one viewing because it does so much so well. The words and images are textured with a wealth of information: there is a lot to look at and take in, seamlessly knit together by Bora Göksingöl’s deft, rhythmic editing.

The title comes from a comment Arab Ali makes to Dr. Cemal as they stretch their legs outside the car at one of the several night stops:

‘Maybe you’re bored to death now. But one day you may get a kick out of the stuff going on here. When you have a family, you’ll have a story to tell. Is that so bad? You can say, “Once upon a time in Anatolia, when I was out in the sticks, I remember this one night which began like this.” You can tell it like a fairy tale.’

Muhammet Uzuner and Ahmet Mümtaz Taylan in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).

Hanging on to a dream

Die Innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) 2000 Germany (106 minutes) directed by Christian Petzold; written by Petzold and Harun Farocki.

A German couple living twenty years on the run from their leftist terrorist past in West Germany is undone by their teenage daughter’s desire for an ordinary life.

This compelling, fast-moving tale is a family drama told from the point of view of fifteen-year-old Jeanne (Julia Hummer) raised abroad on the fly and home-schooled in isolation by educated and mysterious parents whom the viewer knows only as Hans (Richy Müller) and Clara (Barbara Auer).

Jeanne (Julia Hummer), Clara (Barbara Auer), and Hans (Richy Müller)
in Christian Petzold's Die Innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) 2000 .

One of the hallmarks of a Christian Petzold film is its clean, spare architecture. Each detail introduced will reappear, often in ways one least should expect it.

In this story there are no politics, no history, and very little character backstory; there are only Jeanne’s feelings and impressions as the world rushes relentlessly at her and her parents, and Hans and Clara fight to hold it back.

Trained to be wary of strangers and watchful of her surroundings, Jeanne is at the same time childishly innocent of this world. Her age magnifies her conflicting feelings. As she tries later to explain to Heinrich (Bilge Bingül), her first boyfriend and likely the only person beside her parents, and close to her in age, with whom she has had personal contact, ‘My parents and I belong to a cult. It is very strict, and it’s difficult for me.’

The story opens on one of Portugal’s unspoiled beaches during an off season. Jeanne, taking a study break, is having a soft drink and sneaking a smoke at a seaside bar. She eyes a group of surfers. This is one of several scenes in which Jeanne watches young people her age socializing as though she were fantasizing what it would be like to be among them.

Heinrich, one of the surfers, notices Jeanne and comes over to meet her. She cuts short their chat without explanation when she sees her father at a distance; she knows it is time to leave.

Jeanne (Julia Hammer) and Heinrich (Bilge Bingül) in Christian Petzold's Die Innere Sicherheit (The State I Am In) 2000

The family domestic routine—the German title of the film, Die Innere Sicherheit, translates literally as domestic or internal security—is an orderly and disciplined idyll. Hans and Clara are in love; they care deeply for Jeanne, whom Clara tutors in calculus and foreign languages. The family appears to lead the discreet life of affluent expatriates. Their ultimate destination seems to be a comfortable exile in the Third World.

But first they must get out of Portugal. Hans’s trips during the day appear to involve meeting shady contacts to arrange their passage. The irony of the piece is that the family’s sublime and wary isolation is willfully blind to Jeanne’s becoming an adult in the image of her gifted, rebellious and idealistic parents.

Jeanne sees Heinrich again. She goes on a first date with him one evening while her parents are having noisy sex. When Heinrich talks about himself, Petzold literally transports the two hand-in-hand to a house in Hamburg that the boy describes in detail, the house he says his wealthy father bought, where his mother killed herself. Since that time it has been abandoned, he tells her.

A day earlier, an overfriendly, chatty middle-aged local (Rogério Jacques) had engaged Jeanne at the bar, purportedly to correct the German on his menu. The man apparently confirmed that Jeanne and her parents are well-to-do German expatriates living in a nearby apartment building. The family’s apartment is burgled several days later.

The burglary propels the narrative into high gear. Hans and Clara are cleaned out. They must risk returning to Germany to recover money hidden in old drops and contact former associates for the funds to escape abroad.

But the money drops are not productive. Nor are their old contacts especially thrilled to see Hans and Clara suddenly reappear, relieved to have moved on from their shared past. The police are seldom far behind them. It is clear that the authorities consider the couple to be extremely dangerous. The family ends up in Hamburg in the abandoned house Heinrich had described on his date with Jeanne.

Sent out one afternoon to do the household marketing, Jeanne does the entirely natural teenage act of shoplifting clothes and music cds—things she thinks will make her more like the kids she sees and get boys’ attention better than the anonymous duds her parents provide.

She crashes a film shown to a local high school class with a pupil (Inka Löwendorf) she meets in the street. She also discovers that Heinrich is in Hamburg and lives close to where she and her parents are hiding out. 

When Hans finds out that Jeanne shoplifted the clothes and cds, he is upset because of the wildly unnecessary risk to which she exposed them. He makes Jeanne promise not to shoplift or see any boys before they leave Hamburg.

Meanwhile, the only way Hans and Clara see to raise the money they need to get out of Europe quickly is a bank robbery like the kind they apparently did for the cause back in the day…

The film bears a ready comparison to Running on Empty, Sidney Lumet’s 1988 classic, in which River Phoenix starred as the teenage son of parents on the run from the FBI for having blown up a napalm lab in 1971 to protest the Vietnam War.

But what Petzold has done here is closer in nature to film noir: flawed but sympathetic protagonists operate at the whim of a femme fatale—here a teenage girl—to survive in an unjust world. By necessity of their flaw, they must find ways to achieve their end outside the institutions society provides to maintain order and serve justice.

In avoiding the politics and history, Petzold gives his characters more room to grow and develop relationships with each other. His is a highly unusual group of people in extreme circumstances; at the same time, it is a family going through things fathers, mothers and teenagers everywhere experience. 

A boy's best friend

마더 [Madeo] (Mother) 2009 South Korea (128 minutes) directed and co-written by Bong Joon-ho

A schoolgirl is discovered murdered and left ‘on display’ over a railing on the roof of a vacant building of a provincial town in southern South Korea.

The girl’s skull is broken; yet despite a farrago of salacious rumors, she is fully clothed and sexually untouched. Circumstantial witnesses put a 27-year-old man with the mentality and judgment of a small child at the crime scene. Police find a golf ball near the girl’s body on which earlier we saw the man inscribe his name. The suspect signs a confession.

Moon Ah-jeong (Moon Hee-ra) ‘Rice Cake Girl’ hanging over a roof railing
in Bong Joon-ho’s Madeo 2009.

The viewer saw this man follow the girl to the crime scene on the night in question. He had had a lot to drink, and he aimlessly was throwing golf balls he had in his pockets. A brief exchange ensued; the girl appeared to run him off. And then the man shambled away as though he forgot what he was doing there, returning home to his mother.

The signed confession makes this an open-and-shut murder case for the police. Nor does the suspect’s identity surprise the victim’s family or town’s residents.

But Mother (Kim Hye-ja), the boy’s mother—she is not referred to by name (another character once calls her ‘Mrs. Kim’)—knows that her sweet, simple-minded son Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) could not possibly have murdered anyone. She decides to get to the bottom of what happened on her own.

Mother raised Do-joon alone in the intimate private space they still inhabit; the life of the town has eddied around their domestic narrative. Mother is a traditional ‘wise woman’: she sells medicinal herbs in a shop and practices unlicensed acupuncture.

Do-joon is a traditional village idiot: a good-natured imbecile who never worked a day in his life and is the butt of the townspeople’s rough humor. He tags along like a puppy after Jin-tae (Jin Goo), a ne’er-do-well his age whose antics often get Do-joon in trouble—and cost Mother money.

The acting that makes the mother and son roles work is remarkable. Kim Hye-ja’s Mother talks to Do-joon throughout the film like the five-year-old he always has been. One occasionally catches a gleam in her eye that reveals how intensely she works to sustain their domestic narrative. Won Bin’s Do-Joon conveys through doe-like eyes a look of mild curiosity convincingly several beats off the usual pace.

Detectives Nam Je-moon (Yoon Je-moon) and ‘Sepak Takraw’ (Song Sae-beauk) with Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) at the police station in Bong Joon-ho’s Madeo 2009.

The murder mystery evokes a David Lynch drama: an eccentric protagonist enters the looking glass of a provincial city’s normal life seeking answers and discovers unsettling distortions of the town’s placid conventionality—and in this instance, her own story.

The distortions stem in large part from the low status of women and girls. Beneath a thin veneer of propriety, women are treated as though a lower order of being; teenage girls are sex objects.

Nam Je-moon (Yoon Je-moon), lead police detective on the case, knows the family and feels for them, but he is busy. He tries to humor Mother, but the case was over for him when Do-joon confessed to the crime and signed a statement. There is no call for Je-moon further to investigate or to try to find Ah-jeong’s cell phone, for instance. 

Mother turns to Kong Seok-ho (Yeo Moo-yeong), ‘the most expensive lawyer in the county,’ to take her son’s case. It does not take her long to see that the only thing the campily supercilious Lawyer Kong—a great piece of character acting—takes seriously about the case is Mother’s hard-earned money. Her final ‘meeting’ with Lawyer Kong exceeds the bounds of poor taste in any culture, not to mention legal ethics. 

After an embarrassing initial misadventure as her own private eye, Mother is inspired by the passion of her number one suspect to find out what really happened to the murdered schoolgirl Moon Ah-jeong (Moon Hee-ra).

Ah-jeong lived with and took care of her alcoholic grandmother (Kim Gin-goo). Stories went around that ‘Rice Cake Girl’ had sex with anyone who gave her food. Mother also finds out from talking to schoolchildren that Ah-jeong enlisted another schoolgirl’s electronic wizardry to make a ‘pervert phone’ to try to turn the tables on male sex bullies.

However, the old saw that ‘things are rarely what they seem’ is true at least as often as the notion that people miss or willfully ignore details in plain sight which belie their comfortable or conditioned assumptions.

The story sustains its quick pace and intensity throughout with odd characters, tense moments, and hairpin plot turns. Telling details ring true when they come back in a variety of ways, often inadvertent, through different characters as the story progresses.

And evidence depends on who is doing the reading. Unlike letting the proverbial falling chips tell their own tale through a Sherlock Holmesian process of deduction, people tend to start with a fact or two and fill in missing parts with their own ideas, motivations and prejudices to tie up the loose ends. Therein lies the tale.

As in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpieces, Madeo’s ending wraps up the story but leaves a viewer with the uneasy sense that the larger evil is still very much abroad. The last casualty may be Mother’s cherished personal narrative.

By the end, Mother would agree with Ecclesiastes’ Preacher that the knowledge and understanding which bring wisdom, especially of oneself, are not bought cheap, For in much wisdom is much grief: and she that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

According to director Bong Joon-ho, the title Madeo (마더) is a Korean trope on the English words ‘mother’ and ‘murder.’ These words make the same sound to a Korean speaker: Korean phonetics renders both English words as ‘madeo’ in transliteration. The two most common Korean words for ‘mother’ are omoni (어머니) or, more familiarly, umma (엄마); ‘murder’ in Korean is sarin (살인).

Hollow Men

Fat City 1972 U.S. (100 minutes) directed by John Huston; screenplay by Leonard Gardner, based on Gardner’s 1969 novel of the same title; cinematography by Conrad L. Hall; editing by Walter Thompson.

This is a beautiful, gutsy boxing picture made with a documentary touch at a moment when the chattering classes predicted the sunset of the American Dream and the imminent decline of Great America.

No, not last week.

Set in Stockton, California, in the hot, flat depressed inland from the Bay Area, John Huston’s classic Fat City takes place early in the economically painful 1970s in a country waking up in the rust belt to the cream sherry hangover of the 1960s, an unwinnable Asian war, and an ‘imperial presidency’ about to implode in disgrace.

The film’s overture is an opening series of shots that make for a photo essay of Stockton’s former Depression-era skid row, a human-scale yesterday of old storefronts and phantom advertising on brick walls slowly being bulldozed to make way for a modern freeway. The human subjects are mostly middle-aged or elderly black and Latino residents going about their lives, here and there a derelict. 

Several minutes of well-composed shots roll by to the sound of Kris Kristofferson strumming his hit ‘Help Me Make It through the Night.’ The camera finds a man waking up in his bed in a single room occupancy hotel, hungover and rooting around his empty pints for a cigarette. Kristofferson’s voice picks up his plaintive lyrics as the opening credits begin.

The man is Billy Tully (Stacy Keach). Billy is a has-been 29-year-old boxer who tells himself he is going to quit drinking, get back into shape, give his stalled ring career a fresh shot. To paraphrase a popular slogan of the day, today is the first day of the rest of his life.

We eventually find out that after promising beginnings and a taste of the big time, Billy got married; the ‘good life’ led to drinking, and drinking ended up losing Billy his career and his wife.

Step one is to get himself to a gym.

At a YMCA, Billy meets and spars with a nice-looking, energetic younger guy who has good moves and, Billy says, might have a shot at the big time. Ernie Munger (Jeff Bridges) tells Billy he never boxed before; Billy encourages Ernie to look up his former manager Ruben Luna (Nicholas Colasanto) at the Lido Gym where Billy once worked out.

‘I know I saw you fight before,’ Ernie says, going out the door.

‘Did I win?’                                                                                   

‘Naw,’ Ernie admits.

What follows is a classic boxing story based on Leonard Gardner’s 1969 novel of the same title with the screenplay by the author.

John Huston’s direction and Conrad L. Hall’s cinematography go a long way to make this a great movie.

Huston’s work, beginning with his first film, The Maltese Falcon (1941), is well known. Hall shot 1967’s Cool Hand Luke and In Cold Blood; he won an Academy Award for his work on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). He later picked up Oscars for his cinematography in American Beauty (1999) and Road to Perdition (2002).

But what really holds together this well-made boxing story is its diverse and terrific cast. Keach carries the picture. He makes a compelling portrait of a friendless, unlikable, self-destructive, hard-luck bastard. The likable Bridges is Keach’s natural foil as ‘the kid,’ though a kid who just as well could end up like Billy.

Two music selections nicely dovetail Billy’s and Ernie’s characters with the characters of the women in their lives in the period mood and atmosphere.

Billy first meets Susan Tyrrell’s Oma in a bar with her boyfriend Earl. Billy later runs into Oma alone in the same place to Dusty Springfield’s cover of Burt Bacharach’s popular ‘The Look of Love’ after Earl goes to jail for assault. Oma is ‘single’ again and their boozy back-and-forth both captures and parodies the feeling of the song.

The young Tyrrell does an entertaining and remarkable job as a saucy, self-destructive barfly who proves to be an irresistible magnet for Billy. Her work earned her an Academy Award nomination for a Best Actress in a Supporting Role in 1973. (This was the year of The Godfather.)

Elsewhere, and as though a million miles away, Ernie’s Faye (Candy Clark) moodily intimates that they need to discuss Something Important one rainy night when they are out alone together in his car. An instrumental cover of Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ plays softly on the radio in the background. When Ernie figures out what Faye is trying to tell him, he says he thought they had ‘been pretty careful.’

‘If I was careful, I wouldn’t have come out here in the first place,’ Faye replies.

The movie is filled with beautifully written, well-played small moments that give it a steady pulse of authenticity, such as Ruben sitting up in bed at night, telling his wife about the new kid at gym, and then realizing she is already asleep.

Huston notably gave the picture a natural grain by putting then-current and former boxers in the secondary roles. He portrays professional boxing as a tough way to make a living, but without editorializing; he appreciates that men choose this profession and often remain in boxing as trainers and managers. Huston’s boxers seem in many cases to be natural actors.

Among the actual boxers is Oma’s non-boxer boyfriend Earl, played by Curtis Cokes, a world welterweight champion in the late 1960s. When Oma first introduces them at the bar, she tells Earl that Billy is ‘a fighter.’ ‘Oh really,’ is all Earl replies.

Ruben’s assistant Babe is Art Aragon, a professional lightweight boxer in the post-World War II era known as ‘The Golden Boy.’ Billy and Ernie’s teammates in Ruben’s stable, Wes (Billy Walker), Buford (Wayne Mahan), and Fuentes (Ruben Navarro), all were current fighters at the time.

The light heavyweight professional boxer Sixto Rodriguez played Arcadio Lucero, the ailing Mexican fighter whom Billy beats in a key comeback bout. According to Keach, Rodriguez actually knocked him out on the shoot and his knock-out punch appears in the film.

Huston also used ‘real people’ when he put Billy, and later, Billy and Ernie, in fields harvesting onions and gathering walnuts to earn extra money. Billy struggles to keep up with workers methodically digging, trimming and bagging onions a handful at a time and rhythmically hoeing weeds; Huston gets good mileage out of the workers’ backchat and stories.

The final scene is a lyrical passage similar to the coda of HBO’s The Sopranos. As with Tony Soprano, it is not hard to tell that Billy is probably not headed for a good end—though not with a bang, but a whimper.