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).