Shakib_Sheikhi

I just can't believe how Mungiu can address both ethical and legal aspect of society alive and do not give into watery melodramatics. his long-takes are of high mastery as always and like every other of his films the transportation from one place to the other is phenomenal. Best movie of 2016 along with Tonni Erdmaan

Although Farhadi has some noteworthy Cinematic ideas throughout the movie, it is limited to those ideas and does not constitute a movie as a whole. Using a stage for playing Miller’s “death of a salesman” is one of those notable ideas which provide us a possibility to watch how the lives of people is in some degree just a show and the distinction between the show and the real life is of critical matters of modern life. The other notable idea is a well-illustrated three-dimensional interior space of buildings in both opening and ending sequence of the movie which has a lot to say about how each character is related to the other and to the social life as some sort of a “big other”. The script of the movie is highly engineered which makes somehow annoying and unbelievable; the set of items left behind by the intruder is just one of them. This all could be neglected if we could pursue the movie but the #1 thing on the “cons” column of this movie is lack of characterization of the woman (Ra’na) which lives us with our pre-existing judgments about the human emotions and society to help us sympathizing with her, or have any meaningful relation with her situation what so ever; and this makes “the salesman” a mediocre film.

The shadow of death is all over the place. It is reaching out from top of a hill and from a valley to the characters’ soul. This is how I found the first part of the Once Upon A Time In Anatolia: Cold as death, Calm as death, and Dark as death. The cinematic references of Ceylan’s work to the works of Abbas Kiarostami and Andrei Tarkovsky made that “shadow of death” fly over our heads. The second half of the film is a clear struggle between what we are seeing on the screen and what we are perceiving from the narrative: There’s no visual sign of death as such but its meaning still lingers on such that the night is not over yet, or in other words: death does not need you to see it with your eyes, it can make its presence deep down your existence. Ceylan’s work is a masterly directed exhibition of death, weather we are aware of it, weather it is the night dark or the day light.