“Mustang,” directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, IFC Center, ongoing“Everything changed in the blink of an eye,” the young narrator, Lale, says at the opening of “Mustang.” “Everything turned to shit.” One of five sisters living with their grandmother and uncle, she is our entry point into this home, which bristles with paranoia. The girls live in fear of the adults, who ban anything that might pervert their minds, and eventually turn their home into what Lale calls “a wife factory.” Really, it’s a prison — the girls are barely allowed out of the house, and even if they tried to escape it would be difficult getting around the bars installed on the windows. Letting the girls run free would ruin their chances of getting married. Soon enough, that process begins: one-by-one, the girls are married off, each young man worse than the next. Some of the sisters accept their future with resilience. Others fight against tradition, flirting with danger.“Mustang” marks the debut of Deniz Gamze Ergüven, who captures the vitality of the sisters’ lives with remarkable clarity and energy. The camera swirls around them as they indulge in their imaginary world (at one point, they wear bathing suits and go “swimming” in their bedroom, the rocking of the bed substituting for waves), and chases them as they start to break away from captive — familial and societal — lives.An Evening with Ernie Gehr, Museum of Modern Art, November 23This is a rare event: Ernie Gehr, one of the titans of American avant-garde cinema, will make an appearance to talk about “Carnival of Shadows,” an installation currently on view at MoMA. Film historian Tom Gunning will moderate the conversation. Also shown will be recent works made on video, including “Better Than Ever” (2015), “Bon Voyage” (2015), “Mist I & ll” (2014), and “A Commuter’s Life” (2014).“Fat City” (1972), directed by John Huston, Film Forum, through November 26Here’s your last chance to see the new 4K digital-restoration of John Huston’s bleak boxing film “Fat City.” (And also the perfect time to pick up the amazing novel by Leonard Gardner it’s based on, recently republished by the New York Review of Books.) Set in the amateur boxing world of Stockton, California, where, if you’re not fighting, you’re probably drinking, it’s about lives at the end of the road with limited options. “Houston can’t help romanticize their plight — being a former amateur boxer himself — but also revel in their continual scramble,” I wrote almost a year ago when the film screened at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. “These are scrappers, the people at the bottom of the trash heap. Huston wants these guys to succeed but knows there is no way for them to do so. It creates a tension in the film, one that Huston balances with relative ease.”“Klute” (1971), directed by Alan J. Pakula, Film Society of Lincoln Center, November 26, 28The first part of Pakula’s trilogy of films about modern corruption and paranoia, “Klute” revolves around a missing-persons case: the title character (Donald Sutherland), a private-investigator from Pennsylvania, is hired to chase down the clues around the disappearance of his friend. The search sends him to New York and into the apartment of Bree (Jane Fonda), an aspiring actress who picks up tricks on the side. One of those men was the one who went missing. Enveloped in darkness, the camera captures its characters often from a distance, lost in the constant shuffle of city life, but also adds an extra layer of tension. Trying to piece together what is happening, there is always that which we cannot see, something lurking behind a corner, a truth in the shadows not yet revealed. This is screening as part of “The Other Side of Dreams,” a retrospective of the work of the Todd Haynes, where each of his feature films is paired with another film of his choosing.“The Reckless Moment” (1949), directed by Max Ophüls, Film Society of Lincoln Center, November 27, 29Another pick from the Todd Haynes series. Here, Joan Bennett plays a mother of two who discovers her daughter has been spending time with an older man. When she visits him and tells him to stay away, he tries to extort money from her. The next day he is dead, and the mother expects her daughter might have been behind it. Soon enough, another blackmailer (James Mason) arrives at her door like an apparition, claiming to have letters from her daughter sent to the dead man, and offering to get rid of them for a lofty sum. Ophüls, ever the visual stylist, is more interested in the burgeoning relationship between the mother and her blackmailer than noir-suspense, and what creeps in is the suspicion that the two might run off together, leaving everything behind. Ophüls seems to be saying that crime, or anything else really, could offer more pleasure than family and stability: here, he looks at the sexual appeal of wanting the unattainable.
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