Once Upon a Time in Anatolia: Suspect Kenan and the conscience of the steppe

Suspect Kenan is one of the most enigmatic and tragic figures in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. On the surface the film looks like a murder investigation, but it is really about the inner worlds of its men, and Kenan stands at the centre of that. As a suspect who has already confessed to killing Yaşar, he spends the whole night out in the dark, hunting for the body alongside the police, the prosecutor and the doctor. Yet he can’t quite remember where the grave is, or doesn’t want to.

In the story the film quietly implies, Kenan had a relationship with Gülnaz, the wife of the man he killed, and it is suggested that he may be the real father of her child. That is why his burden weighs so heavily. The true tension behind the murder grows out of this. The remorse on his face, his silence, the way his eyes well up from time to time, make us feel that he is not simply a man who committed a crime, but a man who cannot face the weight of what he has done. The expression that crosses his face near the end (in the scene where the muhtar’s daughter Cemile enters the room carrying a lamp) is one of the film’s most unforgettable moments; it is as if he is remembering the innocence he lost, or a life he can never return to.

To my mind, Kenan’s real function in the film is less to represent “the guilty man” than to show that a person cannot run from his own conscience. Throughout the film they seem to be searching for a body, but in truth everyone is searching for something they have buried inside themselves. The prosecutor has his secret, the doctor his loneliness, the commissar his anger, and Kenan his guilt. That is why Kenan is not merely the film’s suspect, but a symbol of a man left alone with his conscience and his mistakes in the middle of the Anatolian steppe, writhing to keep from facing them.

dahaiyisinema, published with permission