Everything About Mustafa

No doubt the lead characters has given some really good performance and somehow decent quality production for Turkish cinema. the plot is not that new , there are such same movies like same plot where wife died and husband found out that she was unfaithful (red shoe diaries by zalman king).

the movie has some huge flaw in start , the reason behind why wife goes unfaithful ? because husband is busy or very uptight ? and when the story starts about the wife when she sitting n crying in Cab , then later there is no such thing that why she was crying that moment.

the movie also some side story line of husband too but it doesnt connect to the main plot but it does connect to the ending which make it not satisfying or good ending.

as seen in the name "everything about mustafa" the movie points out different flashbacks to describe the character. you can't make anything out of it unless you try to think everything separately + combining them + understand the whole idea. the best Turkish movie ever and definitely deserved the Oscar for the best foreign movie ( actually i found it to be better than most Oscar nominees )

with more thought and good dialogues added to Turkish movies like "anlat istanbul" and "mustafa hakkinda hersey", already developed Spanish movie sector and developing Turkish movie sector will have a very important affect on European movies.

With everyone around him faking it and him being ignorant to the actual feelings of people in his life, Mustafa gets sucked into a paradigm shift after an unlucky(?) accident places a stranger as the key to piece together his collapsed life. Yet, Mustafa will find more than what he was looking for and maybe much more than he wished for as he listens to his life told to him in a way he never perceived before. The more it is revealed, the more he discovers what has been told cannot be untold and its ramifications keeps resonating until one becomes part of oblivion. Sometimes to live on, we choose what we see and what we believe in even if it is a lie and Mustafa will not have that luxury to live on as he used to from now on, not anymore...and you will have your share of it after Mustafa touches your life. With Mustafa going through a wide spectrum of emotional turmoil, Fikret Kuskan(Mustafa)'s performance is the highlight of the movie while Nejat Isler(Fikret)'s performance shouldn't be left unnoticed as his character goes through his share of frustration and victim psychology. Even though there were some plot problems with the coherence of the movie, overall this movie was a long due achievement for the Turkish Movie Industry with the wonderful choice of "Mor ve Otesi" as the soundtrack. Get a glass of wine and enjoy this wonderful movie and maybe you will get the urge to see the fireflies as well before everything is over.

Nice attempt to improve the Turkish Movie Industry but its plot is not an original idea. The performances of the players are praiseworthy, but it seems to me that it has some inefficiencies in screenplay. Especially, after the kidnapping of Fikret, the dialogs between him and Mustafa are sometimes very hilarious. I mean this is a high tension movie (at least it is expected to be) and those ridiculous speeches cause me to lose my attention and desire to the kidnapping incident. Fikret Kuskan and Nejat Isler were so successful, and even her small part Basak Koklukaya was awesome.. Despite of all above negative points, I think it is worth to watch this movie; 6.5/10

Cagan Irmak's second feature-length movie "Mustafa Hakkinda Her Sey" is my favourite from his self-written and self-directed filmography. It's a Crime/Psycho, one of the few samples of this genre. The other most known Crime/Psycho movies are "Taxi Driver(1976)" ,"Natural Born Killers(1994)" ,"American Psycho(2000)" and so on. Each of those films have their own distinguishing features and Mustafa Hakkinda Her Sey has references with them. Cagan Irmak has successfully blended these features into his storyboard.

Starting with the opening scene, where Mustafa appears alone in his car at a night time running amok, we're receiving a conceptual warning to watch him very carefully within an Expressionist cinema language. In order to explain the reasons of his depression accordingly the story takes us to a warm family bliss evening, in which Mustafa is the father. We stay there with the family whole evening, witnessing to an ordinary family portrait but to rich character introductions. The next morning while Mustafa is at work, his only son in school, his wife has a deadly road accident. So the plot begins to develop very quickly. Mustafa runs to the hospital to get two shocking news one after another leading him into a manic depressive psychosis. He begins to rake up his past thinking his wife cheated on him, then his childhood traumas floods back. After his wife's funeral, he kidnaps her date when he's discharged from hospital.

The two leading actors Fikret Kuskan and Nejat Isler, performed their roles very well; especially at the scenes where they acted together. A little issue with Irmak's directing that supporting actors and even walker-ons couldn't square with the depressive mood of the movie. Nejat Isler plays a taxi driver, cross-referencing Robert De Niro in Scorsese's Taxi Driver(1976) with similarities to Travis Bickle character in his world-view and behavior patterns. Fikret Kuskan's character Mustafa portrays Patrick Bateman from American Psycho(2000) way too much better than Christian Bale did. I've read some audience reviews where people think that Mustafa character is unreal. I strongly advise them to search for "American Psycho" and Bret Easton Ellis to realize how ordinary people become psychopathic criminals. Additionally in subplots, the torture scenes were Tarantino style and they resemble Natural Born Killers a lot.

Technical aspects of this film is below average. Irmak is good at catching the best camera angles. Sounds and visuals are good enough to keep the tension through the whole movie. Mor ve Otesi did a noteworthy job in score and soundtracks.

With this film, Irmak presents an important message for whoever has past regrets in painful memories. At the end, his note showed that he dedicates this film in the memory of his father. In the leading role Mustafa experienced that he has done some faults which were at the point of no return. Regrets can kill, they slowly eat away the soul of someone who has done something wrong and they lead eventually to self-destruction. Mustafa refused to die like that. He had irreparable faults in his past. Soon he found out that the past is the way you want to remember it.