New Year’s Eve is for many a time to reflect on the past and to welcome the future. It is the passing away of one thing and the arrival of something new. It is no coincidence that Anatolian Leopard, written and directed by Emre Kayis, is set around New Year’s Eve. The main theme of the film is precisely this: the end of one era and the beginning of another. The title is also intentionally ambiguous. The most obvious meaning of the title is that it refers to the endangered leopard being kept in a zoo. But the title applies equally well to the protagonist, Fikret. The connection between these two is that the leopard is a national symbol of Turkey, where the film is set, and Fikret represents what we might call the old guard. He represents the old Turkey that is making way for the new. The central question of the film is whether one can revive the past once it’s clear that it’s dead and gone.
Tp unpack this a bit, we’ll have to go back to the beginning. The film follows, as we’ve said, Fikret, an older man who’s worked at a zoo for more than two decades. Among the various animals in the zoo is the rare Anatolian leopard, an animal that is said to be extinct in the real world. In the film, a group of Arab investors from the Gulf have plans to take over the zoo and turn it into an amusement park. In effect, they want to remove the real animals and replace them with plastic ones. This is clearly metaphorical for the cheapness of the coming age. But, the endangered status of the leopard means that there are all sorts of laws getting in the way of the new development. The leopard cannot be moved so easily and this threatens to derail the entire project.
This is where things get complicated. Fikret does not set out to thwart the project, despite the fact that it clearly upsets him. He is surely one of the more morose protagonists we’re likely to see. After a beautiful scene in which Fikret and a couple of others spend a gloomy New Year’s Eve in a candle-lit bar (lit by candles because there is no power – which puts them in a still-more old-fashioned light), where almost no one shows up, Fikret, in a bout of nostalgia heads to the zoo to visit the leopard. But the leopard turns out to be dead. This is quite a strange twist and we’re not immediately sure who killed the cat or why. The rest of the film follows Fikret and a colleague from the zoo as they try to conceal the fact that the cat is dead. On their trail is a persistent prosecutor. The denouement, which involves this prosecutor, reminded me vaguely of Crime and Punishment.
In the real-world plot of the film, it’s not clear why it is important to hide the leopard’s death. Fikret, after all, did not kill the animal. For reasons I was never quite sure about, the death of the cat would threaten to make the Arab investors balk and abandon the project. Why this would be so is not clear. I would have thought that the death of the leopard would be a convenient way out of their predicament of having to move the animal.
But on the metaphorical plane, their actions make sense. Fikret wants to conceal, perhaps from himself most of all, the fact that the past is dead and gone and that nothing will bring it back.
In screenwriting, there’s a term called ‘saving the cat’. A writer, early on in a screenplay, has the protagonist save a cat or perform some similar act of benevolence in order to get the audience to like them. This film in a way is an effort on Fikret’s part to save the cat even after the cat has died. This is a quintessentially lost cause. Fikret could say, as does Rhett Butler in the Gone with the Wind, that he has, “a weakness for lost causes, once they’re really lost.” He cannot bring back the past, or even really communicate to anyone what’s really being lost here. All in all, this is a poignant and moving Anatolian Leopard about nostalgia and the permanent disappearance of the past.
Written and directed by Kayis, Anatolian Leopard had its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.