FILM REVIEW: And Then I Was French (Claire Leona Apps, 2016)

Jump into And Then I Was French without knowing what it’s about and in places you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a coming-of-age romance. It has all the characteristics of one: the fortuitous meeting between a hunky guy and shy girl, the awkward conversations and the cloistered daydreams.

The delightful thing about French is realising it isn’t that predictable to decipher, as the filmmakers evade the usual rules of genre and stitch a narrative from elements of Gothic romance, 80s body horror and kitchen-sink drama.

The result feels a little like Frankenstein’s Monster, but this approach is often why young filmmakers are so thrilling to watch. French may only be Dog Eared Films’ first feature film, but it’s already been nominated for a National Film Award and selected to premiere at the East End Film Festival.

It’s easy to see why. One of the most startling British films to emerge this side of 2016, French evokes pre-Hollywood Andrea Arnold, and is shrouded in the same creeping, female-centric dread that fuelled Roman Polanski’s Repulsion.

Our protagonist is Cara, a hospitality management student with a mousy demeanour and shy Scottish lilt. Played by quicksilver young actress Joanna Vanderham, Cara represents the ordinary girl on every street corner, girls too insecure to talk to boys they like and whose default state is to fade into the background. Her quiet little world is punctured by the arrival of American heartthrob Jay (a suitably dreamy Lewis Rainer) whose soulful eyes and frenetic personality fans longing in every corner of Cara’s university campus.

He’s a Hollywood siren in a land of lambs.

Written and directed by Claire Leona Apps, the film’s finest moments flirt with the common thriller trope of the double. Take the first, beautifully juxtaposed scenes. Cara’s classroom is presented as a sterile bubble of precision and order, where she dutifully folds towels and arranges vials of massage oil.

This scene melts into a party later that night, where a floating Chinese lantern slyly mimics Cara’s awakened desire. As her eyes meet Jay’s across the green, she is transfixed and cast afloat. Anyone who has fallen in love will recognise this moment; it’s as sudden and swift as an icy river or sharp blade.

Like her heroine, Apps’ narrative cuts deep. The model of starry-eyed love, Cara is romantic and naive, basking in the patch of sunlight that Jay vacates and giggling after he kisses her on the hand. It’s romance in its purest guise.

But the difference between genders always startles and Apps isn’t afraid to examine men and women’s contrasting outlooks on romance. While Cara tells a friend that she loved Jay from the moment she saw him, Jay’s brother brags about sucking on the area between a ‘woman’s pussy and asshole’. Such comparisons feel brutal, but necessary. As Cara’s identity begins to splinter and fragment, the film experiences a similar breakdown, its fairy tale set-up falling apart and filling with darker, serpentine shadows.

While intoxicating, the film’s various layers can feel mismatched, and the multiple shifts in tone may alienate. Matt’s brother, played with aplomb by  Tom Forbes, is ridiculous: a hypermasculine model that terrorises prostitutes in a drug-induced fever and broods in his apartment with a pack of hellish fighting dogs. It’s a delicious dissection of the urban male, but its depravity will turn many viewers into unwitting participants. The film’s last ten minutes are similarly excessive, veering into Gaspar Noé levels of sexual violence.

Yet there are big questions here, if you care to look beyond the instant gratification of bodily gore. As Cara changes herself into a girl Jay will like, every quirk and individual trait falls away, leaving her sultry but vacant. During this transformation, Apps nudges us into thinking about love and beauty. What does beauty mean in an age where a woman’s appearance is edited, filtered and modified? In a pivotal scene, Cara says we only love people’s veneers. If this is true, do we look for soulmates or just people who match our own aesthetics and ideals? And does entering a union mean losing our own self?

French will be overshadowed by recent and much glossier films on female identity, such as Queen of Earth and The Neon Demon, but it’s a fierce debut from a talented group of filmmakers. Desire may fuel the most romantic films, but it’s frightening to see the flipside, where desire sledgehammers and opens the door to obsession, hysteria and self-hatred. French is a similar punch to the gut. Whether this is positive or not is up to you.

*Originally published in music & culture magazine The 405

 

FILM REVIEW: Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015)

The debut film from Deniz Gamze Ergüven is so much more than a Turkish retelling of The Virgin Suicides – it’s an enchanting and often fiery love letter to childhood and the bond between sisters

In the Middle Ages, a girl’s virginity was considered sacred. Unsullied and sexually pure, daughters were a treasure to be guarded, their chastity a commodity that could be bought and sold. Girls were passed from father to husband like paper dolls, and women who tried to rupture this patriarchal daisy chain were frequently branded witches, whores and heretics.

Mustang, the directorial debut from Turkish-French filmmaker Deniz Gamze Ergüven, isn’t set in the Middle Ages, but it does explore what it means to be a girl whose life is governed by men, and where the fierce dichotomy of holy virginity and whoredom defines her every move.

The film opens like a fairy tale in the height of summer. Five young sisters, with hair as long as mermaid tails, run away to play on the beach with a group of schoolboys. They spend the afternoon exploring the foothills by their uncle’s house and falling down in a tangle of limbs, drunk on laughter and apples and their own shimmering childhoods.

Like a lot of fairy tales, the day soon fizzles into nightmare. Childish fun is corrupted, and innocent games are twisted into “depraved” and “obscene” acts. The sisters’ only crime is becoming attractive young women, but it’s enough to set their sleepy Turkish village ablaze.

Mustang is a film that feels light, its lens frothy and sun-dappled, but still packs a punch. Like the ethereal youngsters in The Virgin Suicides, the girls are locked away, forbidden to leave the house or make contact with the opposite sex. The youngest sister, Lale, describes their home as a wife factory, where the sisters are moulded into perfect little women that can cook and clean. Paraded before a wreath of potential suitors, the wistful romanticism of girlhood is scraped raw. We are shown that it’s not attraction or budding love that makes a good union, but the twin prongs of wealth and social status.

Despite her lack of experience, Ergüven imbues her debut with the quiet confidence of a maestro. Mustang may be a small film, but it’s not afraid to tackle large subjects, such as society’s perpetuation of virginity and its vilification of sexual prowess. If a woman is not a virgin, then she must be sexually voracious; if she’s a feminist, then she must reject being a wife and mother. Mustang is very aware of this ridiculous outlook. The girls are adored for being beautiful, young and female yet they aren’t trusted. Every laugh is rebellion, and each lingering gaze carries a promise of sin.

“I’ve slept with the entire world,” one of the older sisters says when asked if her virginity is intact. Her response may be deadpan and humorous, but the context is saddening. Here is a teenage girl who’s learnt that she cannot be validated unless she bleeds on her wedding night, that her torn hymen is the most valuable thing she can offer. Youth and beauty are ephemeral qualities, and it’s hard not to compare the film with our own male-controlled, selfie-obsessed culture, where women are told to be eternally young, or risk being replaced by another set of momentarily precious girls.

Ultimately the film is a testament to sisterhood and the restorative love between women. Although they each have a distinct personality, the girls often appear as a single entity with five heads and ten arms, like a mythical creature or fairy ring. As each sister is married off, a little of this magic is slain. It can’t be accidental that the girls’ veils look like funeral shrouds, or that one wedding is interrupted by a gunshot. Like the most striking scenes in Mustang, these moments are ripe with symbolism. Perhaps the virginity lost isn’t just a bodily one, but one of the self. The sisters may gain husbands, but they also lose their names, their bonds and any identity to call their own.

Mustang isn’t devoid of hope, as Ergüven evokes the unbridled magic and resilience of childhood. Lale becomes the mustang of the film, a spirited, headstrong girl who refuses vulnerability or to become an extension of her future husband. Where the other girls begin to fade, becoming self-destructive or resigned, she fights – spitting in guests’ coffee, stealing money and plotting a prison break. Her creation is on par with cinema’s pluckiest young heroines, like Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird or Mattie Ross from True Grit, and her actions summon memories from our own hardy, half-wild childhoods.

In another pair of hands, Mustang could have felt sanctimonious and clumsy. Instead, Ergüven has crafted a subtle masterpiece celebrating the fleeting pleasures of girlhood. The greatest tragedy is realising that these girls will never truly escape their prison of high walls and barred windows. Even upon release, they must learn to navigate a world dictated by the sharply defined categories of virgin or whore, of daughter or wife, of young and beautiful or old and decrepit.

Through each of her achingly fragile protagonists, Ergüven vows to fight these societal chains, and encourages us to do the same.

*Also published in music & culture magazine The 405