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'Once Upon a Time in Anatolia': Cannes 2011 Review

5:39 PM PDT 5/21/2011 by Deborah Young

A search party hunts for a missing corpse in the drama from Turkish writer-director Nuri Bilge Ceylan.

In the last decade, the Turkish cinema has basked in the light of filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. With Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, the writer-director confirms his stature in a long, slow, hypnotic film that explores the human condition through side glances and offhand remarks, caring very little about time, especially the viewer’s time, in eventless sequences without conventional action. Even the hardened press audience at Cannes burst out in nervous laughter when, almost 90 minutes into a film running over two and a half hours, the first plot point occurs.

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