Film reviews: Mustang; Measure of a Man; The Wait

This Turkish-French-German co-production tackles an issue that would surely be controversial in contemporary Turkey.

Ilayda Akdogan as one of the sisters in Turkish-French-German co-production Mustang.

Mustang is a Turkish-French-German co-production and the feature debut of Turkish-French director Deniz Gamze Erguven, and although it is set in Turkey and spoken in Turkish it was the French entry in the best foreign film category of the Oscars earlier this year. Undoubtedly the film’s content has been influenced by the director’s sojourn in France since its theme — the suppression of female sexuality in contemporary Turkey — would have to be pretty controversial in a country where the current administration seems to be heading closer to Muslim fundamentalism rather than towards Western liberalism.

Erguven has said the film was inspired from memories of her own childhood, and much of it certainly presents a seemingly authentic reality.

In a house by the Black Sea in the conservative eastern part of the country, five orphaned girls, whose ages range from adolescent to pre-teen, are being reared by their grandmother (Nihal Koldas) and their authoritarian uncle, Erol (Ayberk Pekcan).

The film begins on the last day of the school term as the girls tearfully farewell a popular female teacher who is returning to Istanbul. Then, to celebrate the start of the holidays, they fool around in the sea with some of the boys from their class. This innocent frolic is reported to their uncle as a promiscuous act, and the girls are duly punished for it. Phones, computers, makeup and feminine attire are confiscated and, as the girls continue to rebel in the following weeks, the house is turned into a virtual prison, with bars installed on the windows.

Arranged marriages are immediately organised by Uncle Erol, though Sonay (Ilayda Akdogan), the eldest, is given reluctant approval to marry her boyfriend. Selma (Tugba Sunguroglu), the second sister, isn’t so fortunate and has to endure the humiliation of her boorish husband’s family inspecting the bed sheets on her wedding night. Eventually it’s Lale (Gunes Sensoy), the youngest and most rebellious, who finds a way to escape her destiny, in a likable but not entirely convincing finale.

These insights into the world of young women in modern Turkey are at times confronting, the more so because the quintet of five excellent young actors who play the girls — only one of whom had acted before — are so fine in their roles. Aside from the credibility question, the film is mildly marred by an unnecessary occasional voiceover spoken by Lale but more seriously by the constantly mobile and frequently jittery Scope camera (more on this subject below). The film’s title is unexplained, but is presumably a reference to a wild horse that is a challenge to break.

The popular French actor Vincent Lindon won the best actor award at Cannes last year for his role as an unemployed 50-year-old in director Stephane Brize’s uncompromisingly grim The Measure of a Man. It is unquestionably a fine performance that provides a rock-solid basis for the film itself, whose French title literally means “The Law of the Market” or “Market Forces”. The subject is one that will be familiar to working-class people all over the world, and is presented by Brize and his co-writer Olivier Gorce without a hint of compromise or sentimentality.

Lindon plays Thierry Taugourdeau, a factory worker who lives with his wife, Katherine (Karine de Mirbeck) and their disabled teenage son (Matthieu Schaller), in their small, neat apartment. At the beginning of the film, Thierry has already been laid off for more than a year, and is forced to make ends meet with a welfare payment of €500 a month. He has to draw on his modest savings to put food on the table while at the same time enduring humiliating retraining sessions for work he knows he will never be given because he’s too old, interviews that never seem to end well, and negotiations with his bank manager. It’s a depressing life for a man who wants to work, and needs to work to maintain his self-respect, but for whom the theory of a trickle-down economy simply isn’t working.

In a deliberately small film, one of the key scenes has Thierry reluctantly decide to sell the mobile home he bought in happier times and which is located at a seaside town; as he haggles over the price with a prospective buyer, Brize makes painfully clear how important the sale is and what a difference even a few euros will make to the outcome.

Eventually Thierry finds work as a security guard at a supermarket. Security is a growth industry these days. But at this point the film’s approach shifts from its depiction of the everyday humiliations and frustrations of the unemployed to the other side of the fence: Thierry is now called upon to pass judgment on people like himself, people struggling desperately to make ends meet in a supposedly wealthy Western society.

The Measure of a Man is laudable in so many ways that it’s particularly disappointing that Brize and his cinematographer, Eric Dumont, have chosen to film it like a mock documentary, with jarringly intrusive handheld camerawork. The film’s subject matter is tough enough without making the viewer feel even more uncomfortable with its rough and unattractive visual style.

First-time feature director Piero Messina was an assistant to Paolo Sorrentino and worked on The Great Beauty, but his own debut, The Wait, an Italo-French co-production, is a dour affair that lacks the exuberance Sorrentino brings to most of his work. Loosely based on a story by dramatist Luigi Pirandello, the film is — spectacularly — set in rural Sicily where Anna (Juliette Binoche) is living in a grand palazzo mourning the recent unexplained death of her son, Giuseppe.

Enter Jeanne (Lou de Laage), Giuseppe’s girlfriend, who has travelled from Paris to Sicily at Giuseppe’s invitation. Instead of telling Jeanne the truth, Anna tells Jeanne she’s mourning her dead brother, and so the two women — plus Anna’s long-time servant (Giorgio Colangeli) settle down to wait for the son/lover who will never arrive.

Anyone with a slight glimmer of intelligence would surely have twigged the truth from the word go, but Jeanne dumbly refuses to work it out for herself and Anna, presumably attempting to cling to someone who believes her son is still alive, won’t tell her. Neither woman can face the facts, and as a result we, the audience, are in for a pretty long wait. There are hints at allegory — it’s Easter, so think Resurrection — but it’s all so contrived that it becomes maddening and a scene in which Anna “talks” to her son as he takes a bath seems a major miscalculation.

The film is well crafted and consummately acted, but it’s all pretty hollow.

Mustang (M)

3.5 stars

Limited release

The Measure of a Man (La loi du marche) (PG)

3.5 stars

Limited release

The Wait (L’attesa) (M)

2 stars

Limited release