Mustang
Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Oscar-nominated debut about five orphaned girls growing up in rural Turkey has seen her compared to Sofia Coppola and the film itself to the American's 1999 breakthrough, The Virgin Suicides. Actually the comparison flatters Coppola: in many ways Mustang is the stronger work.
Its young protagonists certainly have a lot more to kick against, and as much as the story is personal to the 37-year-old Ergüven - the opening scene, for example, is a straight lift from her own life - it also comments more broadly on hefty issues such as the role of women in Muslim societies and how oppressive cultural attitudes to sex and sexuality can be. In one extraordinary scene, one of the girls is dragged off to hospital on her wedding night because the groom's family don't believe she is a virgin. They want her checked out and, though exasperated by the request, a young male doctor obliges.
Central to the story is the youngest girl, Lale, an extraordinary performance by 13-year-old Güne? ?ensoy who, like most of the rest of the cast, had no previous acting experience. Through her eyes we watch as one by one her “sisters” are married off and what had previously been a fairly happy girlhood becomes something more troubled and troubling. There are few male characters and only one who's in any way sympathetic. Instead, it's on the distaff side that Ergüven finds the thirst for modernity and justice which will change Turkish society for the better. A beautifully-handled film, Mustang picks its way nimbly between intensity and playfulness and its powerful closing scene brought tears to this critic's eyes.
Mustang, Glasgow Film Theatre, February 27 (8.30pm) and February 28 (11am)
One Floor Below
Directed by 44-year-old Radu Muntean, a leading light of the so-called Romanian New Wave, this slow-burn domestic drama beguiled and perplexed critics when it screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival last year.
We open with mild-mannered, middle-aged Bucharest man Sandu Patrascu (Teodor Corban) walking his beloved dog in a park, and Muntean's camera lingers long enough on the insignificant details to let us know that naturalism and realism are the order of the day.
Or are they? When Patrascu overhears a young female neighbour arguing with someone, and that someone turns out to be the married male neighbour from the floor below the Patrascus, he's merely embarrassed. When he hears later that the woman has been found dead with a head injury, he becomes troubled. Not so troubled that he immediately goes to the police, however. And not so troubled that he confronts the married neighbour - even when the man starts to ingratiate himself into his family by seeking Patrascu's help with a business matter and befriending his young, computer-obsessed son.
There are flavours here of Dominik Moll's Hitchcock-flavoured Harry, He's Here To Help as well as The Headless Woman by Argentine director Lucrecia Martel. In both those films, domestic normality is undercut by a brooding sense of menace that never quite comes to fruition. Likewise, Muntean and his impassive anti-hero Patrascu keep us guessing to the end. And beyond the end, in fact: this is a film that sidesteps answers.
One Floor Below, Glasgow Film Theatre, today (8.45pm) and tomorrow (1pm)
Hitchcock/Truffaut
By the nature of the medium, cinema's seminal texts tend to be the films themselves. But one book you will find on the shelves of many directors is Hitchcock/Truffaut, published in France in 1966 and the result of a week-long series of interviews conducted in Los Angeles four years earlier by French New Wave director Francois Truffaut. Using an interpreter, Truffaut moved film-by-film through Hitchcock's career to date and published the conversations pretty much verbatim in an attempt to prove his central thesis: that Hitchcock was an artist rather than an entertainer.
Kent Jones's 2015 film tells the story of the meeting using audio from the interview alongside still images, and uses his 80 minute running time to do in documentary form what Truffaut set out to accomplish in print: give praise to Alfred the Great.
Helping him out is a generous and ever-changing backdrop of film clips from the work of both directors (Psycho, The 400 Blows, Vertigo, Jules Et Jim, Rear Window) and an impressive roster of interviewees, from American pair Martin Scorsese and David Fincher to Olivier Assayas and Kiyoshi Kurosawa, French and Japanese respectively.
Today's film students, to whom Hitchcock's oeuvre must seem like a monolithic block, will be tickled by Scorsese's recollection of seeing many of them sequentially, as they were released, while Fincher does his film-geek status no harm by showing a scarily forensic knowledge of Truffaut's original book.
Viewing Hitchcock through the prism of Truffaut makes for an interesting enough documentary, though it's a shame that Jones doesn't take time to invert the subjects and view French cinema through the prism of Hitchcock. A minor complaint, though.
Hitchcock/Truffaut, Glasgow Film Theatre, today (3.45pm)
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