Mustang

When the summer is awash in big budget special effects laden blockbusters, it’s occasionally a good thing to cleanse your cinematic palate with something more subtle and more challenging, something more about the human heart and less about explosions. To this end, I recommend the 2015 Turkish/French film, Mustang. 

 It’s the feature film debut of director Deniz Gamze Erguven, and it tells the story of five sisters living in a rural village in contemporary Turkey. The sisters ranging in age from 17 to 12 are orphans and live with their grandmother and uncle in a big house outside of town. The film opens on the last day of school before summer. After saying goodbye to their teachers, they walk home with some boys and go by way of the beach. While there, they stop and horse around for a while. Among other things, they play chicken, getting on the shoulders of the boys and jousting, seeing who can push who into the water. To western eyes, it looks like sweet, innocent fun. The problems begin when the girls arrive home and Grandma goes ballistic. A busybody from town called her to say that her granddaughters were behaving in a positively immoral and shameful way – getting on the shoulders of boys, getting their school uniforms wet for everyone to see, etc. As mad as Grandma is, their uncle’s anger is worse. He forbids them from leaving the house and begins installing gates and walls around the property to keep the girls inside and under control. He tells them that they won’t be going back to school and instead will just learn how to be proper young women by taking cooking and sewing lessons from some of their female relatives. 

 

The five sisters hate the increased repression and find ways around it. One sister crawls down the drain pipe on the side of the house to meet her lover in the woods. Two of them sunbathe in bikinis, resting their feet against the very bars that keep them captive. The youngest sister, Lale, who is the protagonist of the film, arranges for all the sisters to sneak out to attend a big soccer match in a neighboring town. With each incident, the uncle responds with more locks and bars and higher gates.

What at first just seems extreme and unnecessary soon becomes nightmarish when it becomes apparent that the girls’ uncle is systematically abusing them at night. First the older ones and then the younger ones. The grandma knows what’s happening but also knows that, as a woman, she has almost no power – cultural or legal – to put a stop to it. So instead, she tries to create the one exit for her granddaughters that she can – marriage. The older two get married off quickly – one happily, not very much not – but the other three sisters are trapped. I won’t give away how the film ends except to say that the sisters do not give up. 

 Without being didactic or preachy, the film addresses the question of the female body, who owns it, who is responsible for it. With almost documentary-like presentation, the film shows some of the difficulty and horror of being a woman in a world so often dominated by men who call the shots. The film creates great empathy for the helplessness and yet the profound strength of these women and girls in excruciating circumstances.

The five sisters together are a force of nature. Beautiful, defiant, smart, and irreverent, they make you wish they were your daughters. The sequences of them joking around, comforting each other, and even just being together as they silently lie on the floor of their room in a patch of sunlight with nowhere to go and nothing to do – they are all organic and completely believable. Throughout the film, their long, dark hair is obviously meant to suggest the manes of the wild horses of the title of the film, the mustang, a creature known both for its strength and endurance and also its unwillingness to be tamed. Despite tragedy, repression, abuse, and neglect, the sisters in Mustang refuse to be corralled into the unfair and hurtful expectations of the world they were born into.

If you are craving a film this summer that gives you something to feel and to think about instead of just lame spectacle, check out Mustang.  

Trumbo

Actor Bryan Cranston has had a fascinating career. Like many working actors, he got his start in TV, but he’s shown an uncanny knack for being part of influential projects. In the 90s, he had a memorable recurring role on Seinfeld, one of the most impactful tv comedies ever. He played Tim Watley, the swinging dentist. In the early 2000s, he was nominated for Emmys and Golden Globes awards pretty regularly for his role as Hal, the loving, unpredictable father on Malcolm in the Middle. Starting in 2008, Cranston switched gears entirely and played the high school chemistry teacher turned murderous drug kingpin Walter White on Breaking Bad, a show that many critics hailed as one of the best television dramas of all time. 

 Cranston has worked in film as well, often picking up small character roles, sometimes in big budget Hollywood pictures like John Carter and sometimes in small boutique independent films like Drive. In 2015, he finally got a lead role in a high profile film called Trumbo. In it, Cranston plays the title character, Dalton Trumbo, a real life Hollywood screenwriter who was a card carrying member of the Communist party. He was blacklisted by the film industry and served time in prison for refusing to testify and name names for the House Un American Activities Committee. During his time on the blacklist, when the film industry publicly insisted that no one hire him to do any work, Trumbo continued to work. Using pseudonyms, he wrote screenplays for trashy B movies just to keep food on the table. But he also wrote prestige projects and either used a fellow writer as a front or used a fake name entirely. Most famously, Trumbo wrote the Oscar winning screenplays for both 1952’s Roman Holiday and 1956’s The Brave One. Imagine the frustration of Hollywood’s mainstream elite when they figured out that they gave their highest, most coveted award to someone they publicly exiled and repudiated?

 

So Trumbo is an underdog story about a man persecuted for his political leanings and his unwillingness to join in the persecution of others. And Cranston does a great job. Trumbo isn’t a well-known figure, so it’s hard to say if his portrayal is a complete embodiment. But it’s definitely a very good performance. His Trumbo is smart, prickly, and principled. At times, he’s maddeningly self-absorbed, but Cranston never plays him as the woe-is-me tortured artist monster. He plays him as a husband and dad who wants to provide for his family and is trying to do it as a multi-million dollar industry actively works to stop him. Cranston plays Trumbo with complexity and great compassion. He brings a vitality to what might otherwise just be a standard bio pic character.

There are problems with the film – Diane Lane pretty much goes to waste as Trumbo’s fierce wife, Cleo. The structure of the film is pretty predicable, checking off the boxes of most based-on-real-life overcoming adversity stories.

 But the naturalistic recreations of behind-the-scenes Hollywood when it was at its height are great, and the actors portraying John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, and Hedda Hopper are top notch. In some ways, Trumbo is what the Coen Brothers’ Hail Ceasar should have been. 

The heart of the film is Bryan Cranston though and his nervy, nuanced portrayal of a man who stood up for his beliefs when he had everything to lose, a man who used talent, hard work, and love to endure and eventually triumph over small mindedness and persecution.