Numan Acar in IN THE SHADOWS. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
The gripping Turkish dystopian fable In the Shadows imagines a place where people slave in a 19th century-type industry but are monitored by 21st century surveillance equipment. An unseen power dominates and controls the workers. But does it have an Achilles heel?
In the Shadows works largely because of the powerful performance by the Turkish-born German actor Numan Acar. Acar, who played the scary Taliban villain in Homeland, has the charisma and acting chops to move a compelling story with very little dialogue.
This is the third feature for writer-director Erdem Tepegoz, and it’s impressive movie-making.
There are than a few tastes of Orwell’s 1984 in In the Shadows. If you admired the 1984 Super Bowl commercial introducing Apple’s Macintosh, you’ll like this Turkish film. It won last year’s Turkish Film Critics Association Award.
I screened In the Shadows for its North American premiere at Cinequest and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021; you can stream it during the festival for only $3.99 at Cinequest’s online Cinejoy.
Select Closed Caption to get the English subtitles in the trailer.
Mustangis about five exuberant Turkish teenage girls who challenge the repression of traditional culture. It’s a triumph for writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, and one of the best films of the year.
The five parentless sisters are living with their uncle and aunt on the Turkish coast “a thousand kilometers from Istanbul”. They’re a high-spirited bunch, and their rowdiness – innocent by Western standards – embarrasses their uncle. Overreacting, he tries to protect the family honor by pulling them out of school, taking away their electronics, putting them in traditional dresses (evoking the dress wear of fundamentalist polygamist Mormons) and conniving to marry them off as soon as possible. The uncle turns their home into a metaphorical prison that becomes more and more literal. The girls push back, and the stakes of the struggle get very, very high.
Our viewpoint is that of youngest sister Lale (Günes Sensoy), who is a force of nature, ever watchful (often fiercely). The poster girl for indomitability, Lale is one of the great movie characters of 2015.
Mustang is a film of distilled feminism, without any first world political correctness. These are people who want to marry or not, who they want, when they want and to have some control over their lives. They want protection from abuse. That is not a high bar, but because they are female, the traditional culture keeps these basic rights from them.
Although Mustang is set and filmed in Turkey by a Turkish writer-director, the actors are Turkish and all the dialogue is Turkish, it is technically a French movie. Director Ergüven works in France and the film was financed and produced in France. In fact, it was France’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar (over the Cannes winner Dheepan and the Vincent Lindon drama The Measure of a Man).
I happened to be in Sevilla, Spain during the Sevilla European Film Festival and saw Mustang there. I was rooting for Mustang to win the Best Foreign Language Oscar; it was nominated and SHOULD have won. .
You can stream Mustang on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes. Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
Diane Kruger in IN THE FADE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Diane Kruger gives a brilliant performance in the searing and emotionally devastating German thriller In the Fade. Kruger plays a German woman whose husband and child are murdered. Her life essentially disintegrates, as a whodunit carries on mostly beyond her. Katja is not exactly the German Betty Crocker. She’s tatted up and has married a Turkish Kurdish man who is a reformed drug dealer. But her grief is universal, and so is her impulse for revenge. Her husband’s attorney Danilo (Denis Moschitto) leads her on a quest for justice. But she must decide whether to take justice into her own hands. And how. And at what cost. The final scene in In the Fade is unforgettable.
German writer-director Fatih Akin, like Katja’s husband, is the son of Turkish immigrants. In In the Fade’s taut one hour, 46 minutes, he has crafted a pulsating page-turner. It can’t be easy to keep the pace of a movie from grinding down when the protagonist is plunging into a puddle of grief, but Akin pulls it off. The horror of the murder is not shown on-screen, but Akin funds a way to make it even more horrible than if we had watched it happen. Akin has made a successful thriller here, not a “message movie”, but he also effectively addresses the topical issues of immigration, racism and terrorism.
Diane Kruger in IN THE FADE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Diane Kruger won Best Actress at last year’s Cannes film festival for this performance. She creates a fundamentally vibrant Katja, who must react to a horrific loss, and then to a series of indignities capped by brutal gut-punch from her mother-in-law. This is a profoundly authentic depiction of grief. When any chance for resolution is jerked away from Katja by a shocking injustice, Kruger takes Katja into steely resolve.
Kruger is an impressively versatile actress. She’s equally good as an American detective with Asberger’s in the absorbing American miniseries The Bridge and as a whim-driven queen in the French costume drama Farewell, My Queen.
Denis Moschitto and Diane Kruger in IN THE FADE, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
In the Fadeis filled with excellent performances. Besides Moschitto, I’ll point out
Johannes Krisch as cinema’s most despicable defense attorney, loathsome down to the prefunctory danke with which he ends each argument.
Hening Peker as the earnest-to-a-fault police investigator, doing everything rationally and by the book, but not in a way comfortable for our sympathetic victim, Katja.
Ulrich Tukur as a character who has found serenity in doing the right thing, difficult as it may have been.
In the Fade won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign language Picture last Sunday and
opens this weekend in San Francisco.
Mustangis about five exuberant Turkish teenage girls who challenge the repression of traditional culture. It’s a triumph for writer-director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, and one of the best films of the year.
The five parentless sisters are living with their uncle and aunt on the Turkish coast “a thousand kilometers from Istanbul”. They’re a high-spirited bunch, and their rowdiness – innocent by Western standards – embarrasses their uncle. Overreacting, he tries to protect the family honor by pulling them out of school, taking away their electronics, putting them in traditional dresses (evoking the dress wear of fundamentalist polygamist Mormons) and conniving to marry them off as soon as possible. The uncle turns their home into a metaphorical prison that becomes more and more literal. The girls push back, and the stakes of the struggle get very, very high.
Our viewpoint is that of youngest sister Lale (Günes Sensoy), who is a force of nature, ever watchful (often fiercely). The poster girl for indomitability, Lale is one of the great movie characters of 2015.
Mustang is a film of distilled feminism, without any first world political correctness. These are people who want to marry or not, who they want, when they want and to have some control over their lives. They want protection from abuse. That is not a high bar, but because they are female, the traditional culture keeps these basic rights from them.
Although Mustang is set and filmed in Turkey by a Turkish writer-director, the actors are Turkish and all the dialogue is Turkish, it is technically a French movie. Director Ergüven works in France and the film was financed and produced in France. In fact, it is France’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Picture Oscar (over the Cannes winner Dheepan and the Vincent Lindon drama The Measure of a Man).
I happened to be in Sevilla, Spain for the first weekend of the Sevilla European Film Festival and saw Mustang there. I’ll be rooting for Mustang to win an Oscar.
The Circle Within (Icimdeki Cember) is a Turkish fable that turns into a psychological drama. An old peddler trudges between isolated hamlets when a younger man knocks him senseless and draws a circle in the dirt around the fallen old man. When he awakes, the old man refuses to leave the circle, which is not a surprise to the younger man. Why is the younger man so cruel? How the younger man know that the peddler won’t leave the circle? Who is really trapped? And why?
The power of the circle stems from the Kurdish religion of yezidism, a non-Islamic minority religion related to Zoroastrianism and Sufism.
Only 72 minutes long, The Circle Within is very slow, and I had trouble staying awake. The Circle Within is not a favorite of mine, but it provides a rare glimpse into yezidism, the Kurds and the Big Sky country of eastern Turkey. The Circle Within’s North American Premiere is March 5, and it plays at Cinequest on March 6, 7, and 10.
In the Turkish dramedy One Day or Another (El yazisi), writer-director Ali Vatansever does a better job writing than directing. The story seems to contain four threads, each about a different couple; but Vatansever cleverly reveals one decades-long romance by illustrating stages of that story with the other seemingly contemporaneous relationships. In a funny side story, a French backpacker happens upon the town and is mistakenly embraced as the new English teacher. The child actors are especially good. Unfortunately, the directing is clunkily paint-by-the-numbers. But it is still a worthwhile and enjoyable film.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, one of the best movies of the year and an extraordinary achievement in filmmaking, is too long and too slow for most audiences. That’s okay with its director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, who says that it’s just fine with him if audiences give up halfway through. That sounds self-indulgent, but there isn’t a bit of self-indulgence in the film’s 2 hours and 37 minutes. It’s just that the movie demands that you meet it halfway. If you don’t, you’re going to be bored. If you patiently settle in to the tempo of the film, you’ll be as transfixed as I was.
Technically, it’s a police procedural because the cops are solving a crime – and, indeed, by the end, we know who committed the crime and why and how. But those aren’t the most important questions posed in the movie, which probes fundamental aspects of the human condition – love, betrayal, loss and decency.
As the movie begins, three carloads of men are driving at night through rural Turkey. They think that they are wrapping up a murder investigation. Two guys have confessed to killing a man and burying his body out in the sticks. The cops are taking the culprits out in the country to locate the body. But the desolate hills and lonely roads all look alike. One of the killers was asleep on the drive and can’t help find the grave. The other one was drunk, and he only remembers a nearby fountain and, unhelpfully, “a round tree”.
They arrive at a potential crime site, but it isn’t the right place. So they drive to another, but strike out again. One group argues about the best unpasteurized yogurt. The men are becoming fatigued and irritable, and, as we listen to snippets of conversation, we learn about each of the characters. We piece together that they all defer to the prosecuting attorney. He has brought along a doctor to observe the corpse; the doctor is living a rut-like existence in a nowhere town, not able to move on after a divorce. The provincial police chief is burned out but puts in long hours to avoid the stress at home (he has a son with a condition, maybe autism or epilepsy). One affable cop goes to the country and shoots his guns to blow off steam. One man is haunted by an event in his past.
This first one hour and twenty minutes of the film is at night – lit only by the headlights of the three cars. Although nothing seems to be advancing the plot, the story is spellbinding as we lean in and try to deconstruct the characters. By now, the rhythm of the story is hypnotic.
The men take a predawn break in a tiny village. The mayor gives them food and tea, acting out of Middle Eastern courtesy and also taking advantage of a chance to pitch a public works project to the official from the capital. The power goes out, and they sit in darkness. Then a door creaks open and the mayor’s teenage daughter brings in a tray with an oil lamp and glasses of tea. She is modestly dressed, beautiful and lit only by the lamp. As she serves tea to each of the exhausted men, we can see that she looks to them like an angel. They wonder how such beauty could appear out of nowhere and about her fate in such a remote village. It’s a stunning scene.
Now the convoy sets off again, and dawn breaks. We see the Anatolian steppe in widescreen desolate vistas like a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. As in the nighttime scenes, when they get out of their vehicles, the camera shoots the men in extreme long shot, so they are tiny against the endless steppe. The cinematography is superb.
Forty minutes in, a character begins telling an anecdote to another, but they are interrupted. After another thirty minutes, the listener presses the teller to finish the story and weighs in with some questions of his own. Near the end of the movie, the two revisit the story. This time the teller of the anecdote connects the dots and finally understands a pivotal moment in his own life. This moment, drawing on profound acting by Taner Birsel, is raw and searing.
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia won the jury prize at Cannes. I felt well rewarded for investing in its 2 hours and 37 minutes. This visually striking movie, with its mesmerizing story, is uncommonly good. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is now available on DVD.
