Last year’s European films were relatively beautiful. Highlight films such as "The Artist" and "Bicycle Boy", as well as a few films, have not received so much attention, but the quality is definitely not low. Like Hungarian director Bella Tal’s "Horse of Turin" and Turkish director Ceylon’s "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia", they are surprising.
Looking at the subject matter, many people may mistakenly think this is a suspense film, but the director's intention is obviously not as simple as telling a story to the audience. The name "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia" is enough to demonstrate the director's ambition. Its prose-like structure also reminds that the film is just a representation of suspense. What the director wants to express is probably still about the general public life in Asia Minor. Attention and exploration.
The film is divided into two parts, night and day, and the tones of the two parts are obviously different. In the first half of the night scene shooting, the director used high-power searchlights and filters to make the lens look like an oil painting. Whether the prosecutor and the doctor talked in the wind under the golden leaves, or the glimpse of the village chief’s daughter under the oil lamp when they appeared on the scene, they were all portrayed beautifully. From this point of view, the lens picture is extremely poetic. In the second half of the daytime scene, the picture becomes cold, with a strong sense of life.
Relative to the color tone, the s composition and the large panoramic lens always run through the whole film. When the police car crawled slowly along the s-shaped slope on the hills of Liao Kuang, it turned into tiny dots under the panoramic lens, which seemed to be hidden in the world at any time. At this time, a sense of desolation and powerlessness also immediately hit the audience's hearts.
In the use of the soundtrack, Ceylon also tried its best to be calm and temperate. The whole film basically uses natural sound, only when Tianming and the group start again, they are dotted with a whisper and sing. The weakening of the soundtrack largely maintains the film's serious and realistic standpoint. This reminds me of the Romanian film "April Three Weeks and Two Days", which also put aside the interference of music and let the film reach the extreme with a calm and objective perspective. Ceylon’s original intention is exactly the same: to display rationally, rather than deliberately sensational.
Ceylon used a murder case as a clue in the film to pull out the living beings in Anatolia. Several major figures such as prosecutors, police officers, and doctors, and secondary figures such as village chiefs and doctors in the autopsy room, each projected the problems of the region. The living conditions of these people are also the epitome of the lives of the residents in this area. The director uses the high-tech approach, plain and powerful narrative, to spread the thinking tentacles throughout the film, but they are all fascinating and glimpsing. Perhaps the director wanted to express too much and too heavy, and the two-and-a-half-hour film length could not be laid out at will; perhaps the director didn't want to dig deeper at all, but simply made a display. The lack of a large amount of information in the film also happens to form the effect of white space, which coincides with the techniques of Gestalt psychology, allowing the audience to chew, speculate, and recall.
The movie did not tell a complete story until the end, but we have already got too much thinking. A large number of metaphorical shots can only be noticed by a careful audience holding their breath. The wailing of the suspect Kenan, the smooth leather shoes of the victim's wife, and the raised feet all give people room for reverie. The director focused on several characters: the prosecutor who struggled with his wife's suicide, the police officer who was troubled by his son's illness, and the doctor who was indulging in the happy past. Because of this encounter, these characters of various professions and all kinds have become the vehicle for the director's philosophy of life to discuss life and death, love and hate.
There is a meaningful empty shot in the movie. The apple on the tree falls to the ground, then slowly rolls from the hillside into the stream, and then drifts forward with the stream. The people on the Anatolian Plateau, just like this apple, are led by fate to an unknown distance under the lens of Ceylon poetry, and no one has the power to change.
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