Once Upon a Lost Time in Turkey

[caption id="attachment_55230135" align="aligncenter" width="640" caption="Ceylan references Sergio Leone the film's title, and more."][/caption]

Acclaimed Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan recently said, “I like to create to mislead people.” Everything about his extraordinary, Palme d’Or-winning film Once Upon A Time in Anatolia seems designed to send its audience in the wrong direction.


The film begins with a party, as three jolly men drink in a roadside mechanic shop. Then the mood abruptly changes to a kind of bleak, CSI-type recast with quarrelsome Turkish men. The story follows four policemen, a prosecutor (the Turkish equivalent of a District Attorney), a coroner, and a pair of military gendarmes through the night on their search for the grave of one of the men. The drinking party evidently turned murderous, but why? One cop observes that unexplained crimes always revolve around women.

After a long night, we at last meet Gülnaz, the young, veiled wife of the murdered man. Her name identifies her as Kurdish, and what may have been merely a story of jealousy or even a family feud takes on a political dimension. As the characters go to breakfast or bathe, before regrouping for the murdered man’s autopsy, we realise that we have spent a night travelling into Turkey’s recent troubled past, without Ceylan actually mentioning it.

Ceylan’s title is a bold reference to the trilogy from Italian director Sergio Leone that begins with Once Upon A Time in the West (1968) and ends sixteen years later with Once Upon A Time in America (1984). Leone was not American, although he made America his subject through three operatic stories about cowboys, revolutionaries and gangsters. His trilogy explores the way that myth becomes history.

For Leone, the most powerful genre is the elegy, the tribute to a dead man or a lost time. Ceylan shares Leone’s love of epic landscapes and passing time, though Ceylan is characteristically playing games with us. His film takes place over a single night and morning, and never strays further than 37km from its starting point. This fact is obsessively mentioned by a gendarme, who is concerned his force should take over from the cops if the dead man is found beyond the city limits.

The director is noting the passing of old Anatolia, but as dawn finally illuminates this landscape we realise with shock that his old Anatolia is a battlefield. This corner of southern Turkey, near the city of Diyarbakir, is where the gendarmerie battled Kurdish separatists for three decades. This undeclared war has now subsided, but its effects are felt everywhere. Gendarmes escort the cops for their protection. The cars have extra gas tanks in the trunks to ensure the police never run out of fuel in hostile country. The lone non-Turkish policeman, from the minority Arab population, is the only man in this travelling bureaucracy who actually knows the roads, though they are only minutes outside the city. A small hamlet is actually a fortified garrison where the mukhtar’s sons all joined the police, while his daughters married policemen.

Despite its staunch loyalty to the Turkish state, the village is dying. The children have emigrated and the mukhtar’s last dream is, in a darkly comic moment, to build a morgue. With no farmers left, the richly-watered fields are almost empty. This vision of Anatolia is as familiar to Ceylan as America was to Leone. The murdered man’s grave is too far outside the city for Ceylan to ever have contemplated visiting in the old days. Yet he has made it his own, by slyly shouldering its burdens.

In Turkish political mythology, Anatolia is the national heartland. Ataturk moved the capital from European Istanbul to Asian Ankara, a town previously known only for its eponymous Angora wool. Yet, in truth, ordinary Anatolians were forgotten or ignored by Turkey’s subsequent leaders who trumpeted their liberalism but ran the country through military law and security courts.

Prime Minister Erdogan’s AKP represented, for many, a new start: after eighty years of Turkish nationalism it was now possible for the new, urban middle class of Anatolia to promote class and religious interests over old-fashioned and unhelpful nationalism. It even seemed that the Kurdish and Arab minorities could be reconciled with this modern, mildly conservative secular Islamic state. It is a political model with appeal beyond Turkey’s borders and Erdogan has been keen to export it in what is sometimes branded a policy of Neo-Ottomanism.

However, many Kurds have grown disappointed with the AKP’s pace of change in opening up Turkey. And as Ceylan’s brilliant film shows, the cumbersome old Turkish state is still mired in the old war zone just beyond its cities. That’s what is in the grave, the dead hand of the past dragging everyone back.