ivanxviii

From the first scenes, implicitly conveying the fact of the royal death, and Claudius' monolog, split between a herald reading a decree at a town square, courtiers repeating "in equal scale weighing delight and dole" and foreign ambassadors echoing them in their respective languages, and finally the king himself addressing his advisors - you know you are watching a work of a master. Of the three most popular screen adaptations, the classic Olivier's, the roaring Mel Gibson's and the Kenneth Branagh's parody, none is even close to this one. The excellent set and costumes, great acting, outstanding dark, gothic-like black-and-white camera work, Shostakovich's music - everything tells of a masterpiece. Of course, limitations of a screen play are obvious - lots of great lines omitted, added scenes (such as Hamlet on his way to England forging the king's letter, which was borrowed later by Tom Stoppard for his Rozenkrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead) - but it's the ultimate screen play nonetheless.

Tags like a cop movie, police drama, detective thriller, murder mystery are absolutely misleading here. This film is none of the above. The ongoing police investigation is just a background of the portrayal of life in a provincial Turkish town and rural areas around it. This life is dreary, dull and boring but Ceylan shows it so masterfully you are totally captivated by the narrative. The people are talking dreary, dull and boring things but those are their everyday matters. There's no grandiloquence, no prettification, no message, no hidden meaning, only Ceylan's perfect realism, his trademark. For completists - the prosecutor's story about his wife committing suicide is borrowed from a Chekhov's short story The Examining Magistrate