Quick Film Reviews: Wiener-Dog, Mustang & 45 years

“Everything has a beginning, and everything has an end.” This is one of many sobering life lessons we learn over time, but one we traditionally never grasp until it’s too late. It’s also the crux of Todd Solondz’s latest cutthroat comedy, Wiener-Dog, a varied collection of quirky stories that meditate on the breathless march towards our respective graves. The 56-year-old cult filmmaker, who smashed independent cinema to pieces over 20 years ago with 1995’s Welcome to the Dollhouse, offers a sardonic twist on mortality through the sordid adventures of an adorable dachshund. For 90 minutes, the titular pooch takes us to four very depressing corners of America that surprise us with their unlikely humor. Wiener-Dog received top marks from major film reviews after its recent premier at the Sundance Film Festival. Mustang: an impassioned reaction and a heartfelt assertion of a group of youthful personhood. “Everything changed in the blink of an eye.” A child warns us early in Mustang, but the subsequent whiplash is inevitable. Mustang unfolds in a small Turkish village by the Black Sea, opening with an idyllic, sun-dappled sequence of five sisters–from youngest to oldest: Lale, Nur, Ece, Selma, and Sonay innocently celebrating the onset of summer with some male classmates. There’s abandon in these early scenes, an unbridled portrait of youth. And it all comes crashing down so quickly. The foreign film earned an A- film review from the Consequence of Sound staff recently, making it one of the best new films.

45 Years: In no particular order, here is a list of things that viewing Andrew Haigh’s latest drama, 45 Years could ruin for you forever: the music of The Turtles; any remaining illusions you might have about romance, marriage, and happily ever after; “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” by The Platters; and any other performance you see this year.

It’s such a small price to pay for the painful pleasure of watching this brilliant film and its lead performance slowly unfold, though. Charlotte Rampling is nothing short of a revelation in 45 Years, delivering a tour de force so strong, so skilled and measured, and yet so emotionally fraught that it threatens to eclipse both her own career, and the rest of the film.