Good Reviews

Directed by Michael Dudok de Wit

In its latest feature film, The Red Turtle, celebrated Japanese animation studio, Studio Ghibli, once again creates magic. While legendary director Hayao Miyazaki has set expectations for the studio impossibly high and will always be Studio Ghibli’s most revered contributor, Dutch-British animator and director Michael Dudok de Wit walks a tightrope and makes it to the other side, impressively channelling the spirit and energy of the studio while ultimately creating a work of art that is all his own. The film is a wordless masterpiece that explores the full range of human emotion through the virtuosic use of sound and color.

The Red Turtle follows the arc of a man’s life after he is stranded on a deserted tropical island and forced to remain by a striking, and enormous, red sea turtle. In many ways, the man is equally mysterious. We never learn his name - he is described only as “The Father” - or how he came to be swept up by the sea, but we are instantly invested in his survival. However, what follows is not simply another rehashed castaway story. Instead, Studio Ghibli has produced another profound and moving reverie on the essence of human existence and the codependence of humankind and nature.

The Red Turtle has no spoken dialogue, but what results is something new and even more impactful. Since there are no words to listen to, our eyes and ears are more acutely attuned to the messages conveyed through sound and vibrant color. This is the beauty of the animated medium. The characters don’t need to spell out how they feel in words when their internal struggles and joys are so clearly communicated by the score and through the carefully crafted images. This is the real achievement. Free from the limitations of the spoken word, Dudok de Wit uses images and sound alone to explore the full spectrum of human experience. We feel it all, from the dread of loneliness and isolation to the exhilaration of newly discovered love. He is so good at what he does that even the sand crabs and palm trees seem to be full of feeling and emotion.

Every frame of this film is visually breathtaking. Dudok de Wit brings his simply drawn characters to life, allowing us to believe in their humanity despite their animated features and making it easy to experience the action with them. Whether it’s the power of a crashing tsunami or the weightlessness of floating in a tranquil ocean, we feel the images on the screen viscerally.

The film moves seamlessly between dream and reality, blurring the lines between these moments with ease. And while the themes of intimacy and interconnectedness between humans and nature seem apparent, these dreamy sequences leave plenty of room for viewers to wonder, imagine, and contemplate for themselves.

Over the course of the film, we are introduced to the others, a nameless woman (“The Mother”) and an exuberant, but lonely child (“The Son”). The bonds between these characters are tangible and the love between them certain, but we are never given much more context about any of them. Is this woman or this child even real? Are they human or are they deities? Or do they represent some other aspect of the natural world? We never get these answers, but by the end of the film, we’re left to question whether it even matters at all.  

As you watch the film, it’s hard not to think about The Great Wave off Kanagawa, the instantly recognizable woodblock print by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. In that print, we see a massive, crashing wave frozen mid-crest, the bright whites and deep blues of the wave towering over Mt. Fuji in the background. The Red Turtle feels like an expansion of that piece, a contemplation on the beauty and power of nature captured in the simplicity of a crested wave. Dudok de Wit himself seems to give a nod to the classic work in one of the film’s most poignant moments.

There are certainly moments when the magic almost fades. On at least one occasion, the mood starts creeping toward sentimentality. Thankfully, it never actually crosses that line into melodrama or sap. Allow the film as a whole to draw you in, and you’ll be swept away for a thrilling ride. The pace of the film is deliberately slow, which may be frustrating for some viewers, but for those that have the patience and attention span, the payoff is more than worth it. We are watching a man’s life unfold, and this kind of heady poetry is hard to present any faster.

Directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven

As a record number of women prepare to assume positions of power and influence in this country, Mustang feels like a film for this moment, a quiet but profound warning about the dangers of ignoring the voices of women and restricting them from living their lives freely and openly. In her spellbinding debut, Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven creates a raw, affecting, humanist film that forces viewers to confront the tragic range of human consequence that results when young joy is suppressed.

From the first frame, Mustang sucks the viewer into a world of rich colors and sun-drenched landscapes, an idyllic Turkish village where all the families know each other and the rhythms and traditions of life are firmly established. We meet Lale, a young girl of eleven or twelve who serves as the film’s narrator and whose perspective informs our own. Wispy and wild, she is a blossoming force of nature, self-assured and confident in her forming individuality while simultaneously absorbing messages from her community about who she is expected to be and become. We are also introduced to her four stunningly beautiful teenage sisters - Sonay, Selma, Ece, and Nur - the five of them coming together to form a free-flowing ball of energy, a tangle of dark hair and long limbs. Inseparable, the girls dot the film’s score with their own cries, alluring and seductive, echoing with both laughter and pain.

The film begins with glimpses of what could be as the girls gush with the feelings of exhilaration and possibility that we all know from the last days of school before summer. The five sisters, innocent and naive, splash through the water and jostle playfully with a group of boys at the beach, riding on their shoulders in what we quickly learn is forbidden contact. Their breathless laughter continues as they make their way home, roaming through a neighbor’s yard and helping themselves to his apples, eventually stumbling through the doorway of their house in a fit of sisterly love and giggles. But reality strikes swiftly as their strict and conservative grandmother meets them at the door and grabs them one by one, starting with the eldest, intending to discipline them mercilessly for their “immodesty” and indiscretion.

While a Western audience may recoil at this seemingly vicious response to meaningless teenage flirtations, Ergüven masterfully avoids cliches and easy answers. She treats each of her characters, including the girls’ grandmother, evenhandedly and withholds judgment. Despite our initial, visceral reactions to their grandmother’s obsession with strictly-defined gender roles and decorum, we are eventually forced to question our own assumptions about her intentions and the utility of her decisions. Are the blows of a tradition-bound grandmother useless for simply perpetuating patriarchal norms or do they hold any value if they are motivated by a deeper desire to protect the girls from an unforgiving world that she already knows? Does intent even matter if the ultimate consequences are still sexist and oppressive?

What follows is a slow but heartbreaking descent into despair as the girls’ grandmother and domineering uncle attempt to break their spirits and marry them off one by one. Small details speak volumes about the depth of the girls’ deprivation. They clamor over a wad of chewing gum. They hit a ball against a wall with mind-numbing repetition. They lay around for hours, imagining different futures and present realities for themselves. Prison bars – literally and figuratively – go up, and each of the sisters, respectively, finds her own unique method of coping. Each girl is her own Rapunzel, trapped in a tower and forced to decide whether to wait silently for her prince or seize her own path to freedom.

Despite the heavy premise and the frustration of watching youthful energy die a slow death, Ergüven manages to maintain a welcome sense of optimism in her film. She does this through Lale, who is too young and hopeful to accept defeat and, in one of the film’s most vibrant, head-spinning scenes, leads her sisters to escape their captivity and experience a night of celebration that none of them - or any of us - will ever forget. A worthy protagonist, Lale is never one-dimensional or cliché. She is strong-willed and visionary, but still a child. She is the youngest of the sisters, but in many ways, the wisest. Her depth and believability are a true credit to Ergüven’s careful direction and newcomer Günes Sensoy’s pure understanding of the character she was tasked with embodying.

With this breathtaking debut, Ergüven has demonstrated a firm understanding of the complex nuances of human emotion and interaction. She knows how real people respond to crisis and manages to portray their internal workings in ways that are both subtle, yet honest.

Ergüven artfully guides her young leads, all non-professional actors, to convincingly express the explosive, seductive energy of youthful promise and the tragedy of sexist oppression, and although the sisters do not enjoy an equal amount of screen time or development, they each do a valiant job of allowing us to know and empathize with their characters deeply.