LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT
I, the deceased, whose name you will learn and whose face you will see and whose body is currently beneath the earth near a fountain I can no longer identify, being of sound mind at the time of my death and of no mind at all now, do hereby bequeath the following:
To the night, I leave the first three hours of this film.
They are looking for me. A prosecutor, a doctor, a police commander, two gendarmes, a driver, a digger, and two suspects. They drive across the Anatolian steppe in a convoy of vehicles, headlights cutting through darkness so complete it seems less like an absence of light and more like a substance, something the cars must push through.
The suspect, Kenan, says he buried me near a fountain. There are many fountains in Anatolia. He was drunk when he did it. He is not sure which fountain. They stop. They dig. I am not there. They drive on. They stop again. I am not there either. The night continues.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan films this search with a patience that borders on cruelty. The drives between stops are long. The stops themselves are longer. The men stand in the dark and smoke and wait while the digger digs and finds nothing, and the nothing accumulates until it becomes the film’s primary material. The nothing is what you watch. The nothing is where the meaning lives.
This is the first thing people say about Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: it is slow. They are not wrong. It is slow the way the steppe is slow, the way the night is slow, the way the process of searching for a dead man in the dark when the only witness is drunk and uncertain is slow. The slowness is not a stylistic choice applied from outside. It is the speed of the event. Ceylan matches his film to the rhythm of the search, and the rhythm of the search is the rhythm of men who are tired, frustrated, and unwilling to admit that they may not find what they are looking for.
To the landscape, I leave everything it already owns.
The Anatolian steppe at night is one of the great landscapes in cinema. Ceylan and cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki shoot it as a presence, not a backdrop. The hills roll in darkness. The headlights illuminate strips of road that vanish behind the convoy. The sky is enormous. The stars are indifferent. When dawn finally arrives, more than an hour into the film, the light reveals a landscape of such austere, rolling beauty that you understand why people have lived here for thousands of years and also why they look so tired.
Ceylan has always been a filmmaker of landscape. His earlier films, Distant and Climates, used the Turkish terrain as emotional architecture: wide shots that placed human figures at the mercy of spaces too large for their feelings. In Anatolia, the landscape does something different. It waits. It knows where I am. It has always known. The men driving across it are the ones who don’t know, and their ignorance makes them small against the hills in a way that is not poetic but factual. They are small. The land is large. I am underneath it.
To the prosecutor, I leave his story about the woman who predicted her own death.
His name is Nusret. He is played by Taner Birsel. During one of the stops, he tells the doctor a story. A woman in a village told her husband the exact date she would die. She was healthy. She had no illness. She gave the date. On that date, she died.
The story is told quietly, casually, the way men tell stories to fill time when they are standing in the dark waiting for someone to dig up a body. It is also the center of the film. Not its plot center. Its gravitational center. The idea that a person can know the moment of their death and that the knowledge itself might be what kills them. That will and fate are not opposites but collaborators. That dying might be, in some cases, a decision made so deep inside the self that it looks, from the outside, like nature.
The prosecutor tells this story and then mentions, without emphasis, that the woman’s husband was under investigation for a financial crime at the time of her death. The implication settles into the night air and stays there. The prosecutor does not pursue it. The doctor does not ask. The film lets you carry it.
To the doctor, I leave the autopsy.
His name is Cemal. He is played by Muhammet Uzuner. He is the film’s closest thing to a protagonist, though “protagonist” implies agency, and Cemal has almost none. He observes. He smokes. He listens. He does not sleep. He is the only person in the convoy who seems fully awake, not because he is more alert but because he is more burdened. Something is weighing on him. The film will not tell you what it is until the final scene, and when it does, the telling will be so quiet you might miss it.
Cemal performs my autopsy. He opens my body. He examines my organs. He determines the cause of death. Or: he determines a cause of death. Or: he determines a cause of death and then, in the final minutes of the film, does something with that determination that changes the meaning of everything you have watched.
I cannot say more. The ending of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is one of the most devastating quiet moments in any film on this site, and it depends entirely on your having spent two and a half hours watching these men move through the night and talk and smoke and eat and not say the things that matter. The ending is the thing that matters. It arrives like a stone dropped into still water, and the ripples move backward through the entire film.
To the village, I leave the scene with the girl.
The convoy stops at a village in the middle of the night. The mukhtar, the village headman, invites them in. He apologizes: the generator is broken, so there is no light. Tea is served by candlelight. The men sit around a table and eat and talk, and the mukhtar apologizes again, and the conversation is banal and warm and human in the way that hospitality between strangers in the dark is always human.
Then the mukhtar’s daughter enters the room, carrying a tray of tea.
Ceylan films her in candlelight. She moves through the room. Every man watches her. The prosecutor watches her. The doctor watches her. The suspects watch her. The camera watches her. She is young and beautiful, and the candlelight on her face is one of the most luminous single images in twenty-first-century cinema. She sets down the tray. She leaves.
The room is different after she passes through it. The men are different. Something has entered the darkness that has nothing to do with the body they are searching for and everything to do with why the search matters. Beauty. Life. The thing that death takes away. Ceylan does not underline this. He does not need to. The girl enters, the candle moves, the light falls on her face, and for thirty seconds the film stops being a procedural and becomes something sacred.
To the silence, I leave everything that was not said.
The men in this film talk constantly. They discuss buffalo yogurt. They discuss the quality of the village bread. They argue about which direction to drive. They tell anecdotes. They complain. The prosecutor and the doctor develop a quiet intimacy built from shared exhaustion and the mutual recognition that they are both intelligent men stuck in a situation that intelligence cannot solve.
But no one says the important things. The prosecutor does not say what he really thinks happened to the woman who predicted her death. The doctor does not say why he is so tired, so withdrawn, so haunted. The suspects do not say the full truth of what happened to me. The silence between the words is where the film actually takes place, and Ceylan, who understands silence better than almost any living filmmaker, shapes every conversation around what is missing from it.
This is what makes Once Upon a Time in Anatolia peculiar. It is a procedural. A body is missing. A search is conducted. The body is found. An autopsy is performed. A report is filed. The genre is clear. The structure is legible. And yet the film uses that structure the way a river uses its banks: to contain something that is constantly pressing against the edges, something that is larger and deeper and more turbulent than the channel that holds it.
To the living, I leave the question of genre.
It is not a crime film, though a crime is its occasion. The crime is solved within the first half. The solving is not the point. It is not a character study, though its characters are among the most fully realized in any film this century. It is not slow cinema, though it is slow. Slow cinema implies a formal commitment to duration as aesthetic principle. Ceylan is not committed to slowness. He is committed to accuracy. The film is as long as the night is long. The search takes as long as the search takes. The men are as tired as men who have been driving through the steppe all night would be.
It has been compared to Chekhov, and the comparison is exact. Chekhov wrote stories and plays about people who talk around the things that matter, who fill silence with conversation and fill conversation with everything except the truth, and whose deepest feelings emerge only in the gaps between sentences. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is Chekhov on the steppe, at night, with a corpse.
I am the corpse. I am also the least important character in the film. My death is the occasion, not the subject. The subject is what my death does to the men who must find me, examine me, explain me, and carry the knowledge of what they find back into the daylight, where it will sit inside them like a stone they swallowed and cannot pass.
To the earth, I return myself.
The will is complete. The bequests are made. The men will drive home. The doctor will file his report. The report will say one thing. The truth will be another. The distance between the report and the truth is the size of the entire film, and the film is two and a half hours long, and none of them are wasted, and when it is over you will sit in the dark and feel the weight of a night you did not live through settle into your body like something you will carry for a long time.
The fountain is still there. The steppe is still there. The dead are always where you left them. The living are the ones who move.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da) — Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Turkey, 2011. 157 minutes.
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