It won the Cannes grand prix – but people have been walking out of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Stuart Jeffries finds him unrepentant
'The problem with Hollywood," says Nuri Bilge Ceylan, "is the audience expects to get the answers like a pill. They expect to know not just whodunnit, but the motives of the characters, the how and why. Real life is not like that. Even our closest friend – we don't know what he really thinks. In films we want more than in real life, everything being made clear. That means this kind of cinema is a lie. I cannot make cinema that way."I had asked the 52-year-old Turkish director to explain why his new film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, which won the grand prix at Cannes last year, refuses to provide answers. It's an epically lugubrious, austerely beautiful 157-minute police procedural in which a murder suspect is driven around the Anatolian steppes at night in a convoy of police cars, to find the place where he and his brother buried their victim. Along the way, we learn lots of increasingly gloomy things: what kind of yoghurt the cops like, how Turkey will need to reform itself to join the EU, that the local doctor likes to quote Russian poetry – but not who did what to whom and why.
FULL ARTICLE from Turkish Cinema Newsletter
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