Mustang (2015)

Five sisters in conservative, rural Turkey find the net of tradition closing around them in this eloquent and gorgeous debut feature from Deniz Gamze Ergüven. After they’re seen playing with boys at the beach, a nosy neighbour tells their family, inciting patriarchal fears about their marriageability and their sexual corruption. An early scene features them being taken to the doctor so he can confirm that their hymens are intact and they remain virgins – the matter-of-fact acceptance of this violation by all involved is chilling.

There is a loose age cluster of three older sisters – the liberated Sonay, the resigned and apathetic Selma, the impish and rebellious Ecce – and two younger sisters – Nur and Lale, who serves as the narrator and offers a perspective by turns childish and curiously cynical and penetrating. Regardless of the age gap, they’re united in a way which seems to transcend their individual identities – they blur together in dreamy montages featuring them packed into a single bedroom, enjoying a playful physical closeness, one soul in five bodies. The sisters are orphans, raised by their grandmother and living under the roof of a domineering, violent uncle, the patriarch Erol. They have been given free rein by their grandmother rather than routinely crushed into obedience, which makes them unused to the sudden strictures of barred windows, high walls, and the shapeless dresses – denounced by Lale as excrement-coloured– they’re made to wear to preserve their modesty.

For all that the social issues make the film sound preachy or political, Mustang’s ideological ambitions never interfere with its art. Its explorations of masculine possessiveness and insecurity are woven seamlessly into the narrative – when Selma’s wedding night doesn’t result in the blood-stained sheet which is prized by the husband’s family as (disturbingly medieval) proof of a virgin wife, her husband suspects he’s been duped and takes her to the hospital so the doctor can inspect her for the second time. A still, minimalist shot takes in Selma lying on the berth with a sort of impassive discomfort, as the doctor probes off-screen. Her hymen was present all along – her husband simply couldn’t penetrate it. It’s an elegant comment on how the girls have been objectified and dehumanised to assuage the pride of weak men.

While those elements of society are given their just – and stomach-turning – representation, Mustang doesn’t dwell on misery. The girls are vibrantly alive, finding ways around paranoid familial monitoring, high walls, and forced marriages. Not all of them make it – but they rarely resign. A particularly beautiful sequence has them escape from the house to go to a football match in Istanbul. When they wind up appearing on TV as part of the crowd, their grandmother and their aunts must scramble to prevent their uncle and the other men from seeing, which leads to a deliciously comic solution. There’s an interesting distinction between the gentler, more discreet tactics used by the women and the simple violence of the uncle, Erol. Their scramble to save the girls is a rare moment of female solidarity across generations. But when the girls return from the match, it’s their grandmother who has the house walls raised and locked gates installed. She’s the one who knows that Erol is sexually abusive, but doesn’t go to the police. She’s the one who has them married off, happily or otherwise. Even the women are complicit in the oppression of their nieces and granddaughters.

While Mustang occasionally delves into montage, it's for the most part a naturalistic film (albeit with beautiful, saturated cinematography which gives it a hallucinatory shimmer), stringing together incidents of cause and effect, sibling banter, and vignettes of household routines. The life of the sisters is neither all misery nor the happy childhood it should be. Being trapped in their situation, they accept the presence of inequality and oppression without fully reconciling themselves to it. There’s no thesis-statement scene where they have a philosophical debate over the rights of women with their elders – luckily for Erol, who could have scarcely moved beyond the repellent platitudes which come from his educational TV programs (‘Women are too bold nowadays – where are the women who blush when men look at them?’) if challenged on the point. The film’s retort to this imprisonment is made ably by taking the perspective of the sisters and showing them both for the blossoming young women and the playful children they are. In its world, the former must be stifled – the latter robbed of innocence. Thankfully, though Mustang is unsparing in its depiction of the realities of life as a young girl in backwater Turkey, it has the heart to give the girls some freedom. 

The Nice Guys (2016)

Between the mismatched pair of investigators, the convoluted criminal conspiracy, the steadily-rising death toll, and the LA setting, it’s obvious that Shane Black is repeating himself with The Nice Guys, and his directorial debut Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a hard act to follow. But with an upgraded central pair of Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling, and an even more quip-heavy script, Black pulls it off – and then some.

Holland March (Gosling) is a private investigator ripping off old ladies to make the rent on his ostentatious palm-fronted house. Jackson Healy (Crowe) is an enforcer who beats people up for a fee – bad people, usually, like a 70s version of pre-superpowers Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool. They collide when March goes looking for the wrong girl – Amelia – who hires Healy to break his arm and warn him off. After couple of semi-competent henchmen pressure Healy to give up Amelia’s location, he teams up with a very reluctant March to figure out what’s going on, and why everyone around Amelia keeps dying.  

While the plot lacks the elegance and the final emotional gut-punch of Kiss Kiss, the film more than makes up for that with sheer entertainment. Crowe and Gosling are an even more delightful comic pair than Downey and Kilmer, because while the latter two had a largely-stable dynamic of Downey being a bumbling idiot and Kilmer insulting him, Crowe and Gosling take turns to be the smart one. Gosling’s alcoholic private eye Holland March is likeable in spite of himself – underneath his cowardice and basic lack of morals, there’s a sort of scrappy underdog cleverness which resembles the famous fictional private eyes of old, and his honest terror at the chaos around him adds an audience-surrogate aspect to his charms. Crowe is largely relegated to playing the straight man as the bemused enforcer Jackson Healy, but March is so vibrant as a character that Healy doesn’t need to do more than stare in disbelief at his screw-ups to get a laugh.

The Nice Guys has a hilariously wacky plot featuring a porn film that’s secretly an environmental expose about car pollution, and auto manufacturers trying to suppress it, but it never quite comes together into a sensible, coherent whole. The villains are similarly unengaging – they either follow in the tradition of Iron Man 3’s amusingly self-aware henchmen or play stone-faced killing machines. The most enjoyment to be had out of them is either watching their incredulity when our heroes – for want of a better word – keep making fools of themselves.

Nevertheless, the opulent excesses of 70s porn mogul’s mansions and five star hotels being recreated in full, the joke-a-minute pace of the script, the unusual amount of slapstick and inventive physical comedy, and incredibly weird – but hilarious – divergences involving a giant fly and Richard Nixon, all signal that Shane Black had the time of his life directing this film. His enthusiasm is contagious. 

And while the film’s delights are mostly on the surface, Angourie Rice as March’s precocious 13-year-old daughter Holly is the film’s emotional center, in a superb performance. At one point, March asks her: “Give it to me straight. Am I a bad person?” and she agrees with zero hesitation. Their dynamic is almost one of equals, with Holly more a sort of long-suffering little sister than a daughter. At one point, fed up with March’s apathy and alcoholism, she explodes at him, and you can’t help but wince at her cuttingly honest anger and disappointment. If the film has any emotional arc, it’s about Holland learning to live up to his daughter’s expectations. That might be clichéd, but like everything else about The Nice Guys, all you have to do is put the right actors in and give them a good enough script - and it works great. It might the most entertaining film of the year so far.

A Bittersweet Life (2005)

A Korean gangster, Kim Sun-woo, is told to shadow his boss’s girlfriend to find out if she’s unfaithful. If she is, he must execute her and the man she’s with. When Sun-woo can’t go through with it, his life gets complicated.

Sun-woo is presented to us as the epitome of professionalism, a man equally comfortable while obsequiously pouring drinks for his boss and while beating up thugs from a rival organisation. Early long shots that follow him gliding through the gleaming, symmetrical decor of the hotel owned by his organisation underscore the impression of his infallibility. The camera moves from the visitor’s areas to ramshackle brick service corridors with leaking ceilings, which I took to mean little more than that the Korean mob’s respectable front hides a grubby interior. But it seems to replicate the experience of watching A Bittersweet Life, too.

The first twenty minutes of the film are typical to a fault, introducing Sun-woo, his boss, the task that’s set to him, with room for action scenes and the first blush of attraction between him and his boss’s mistress, Hee-soo. Present too is the definite implication of infidelity – he doesn’t yet have proof, but it’s almost certain that he’s eventually going to have to kill her. In this respect, the film’s conflict plays out fairly predictably. What’s odd is its tone.

The first sign that I wasn’t watching something by-the-numbers (if very well-made) came with the introduction of the loathsome Baek, the employer of the thugs Sun-woo casually dispatched. He’s not happy. He calls Sun-woo, who’s apathetic, telling him to come to the hotel and speak to him in person if he has a problem, then hanging up. What follows is an odd mixture of comedy and brutality, as Baek snatches the handle of the corded phone away when one of his henchmen tries to take it and redial. The cord detaches from the phone, rendering it useless. It’s a neat gag, and the henchman can’t help but giggle. The psychopathic Baek explodes, throws the phone at him, comes around the desk, and uses the phone to beat him till we hear the wet thump of flesh and bone rupturing. He can't use a phone with bloody hands, so another henchman flips open a phone and puts it to his ear without having dialed anyone. Baek is incensed to the point of giving up entirely, cursing at his incompetent staff before telling the man who to call.

That dual sense of comedy and brutality pervades A Bittersweet Life. Scenes which would be tiresome if played straight, with Sun-woo as an invincible action hero killing his way through the mob, become arresting, tense, and amusing as they're played to maximise the bumbling of all involved. Sun-woo’s veneer of urbane unflappability is shattered when his boss finds out he didn’t kill the unfaithful girlfriend, and he’s brutalised and brought low in surprisingly pathetic ways. From then on he’s less the dangerous gangster we saw early on then a sort of scrappy, miserable underdog, like a hard-boiled PI on the downslope of one of his stories, taking beating after beating while trying to reach the truth. The film has the familiar skeleton of a revenge narrative – our hero trying to get even with the boss who betrayed him – but engagingly subversive execution which keeps it from ever getting boring.

A Bittersweet Life begins and ends with two pieces of sappy Zen wisdom. A disciple sees a tree moving in the wind and asks his master what moves. “Neither the wind nor the branches move, it is your heart and mind”, his master says. Later, the same disciple awakens from a dream, sobbing, and says he cries even though it was a good dream, because he knew it was too good to ever come true. I’m not sure those extracts are appropriate – the film’s subversively comic approach and its casual brutality seems to work against their melodramatic, faux-profound nature, even as the occasionally-overwrought weeping violins of the soundtrack and Lee Byung-hun’s moving performance as Sun-woo justify their inclusion. The film seems torn between Fargo-esque black comedy and an urge to romanticise its subject matter. But even if it’s not perfectly-realised, it’s certainly worth a look.