Alex Dudok de Wit
Like all kids, this film’s narrator has a vivid imagination. We follow its twists and turns, witnessing random happy scenes from her childhood in Turkey – riding the train, playing with animals – as she describes them. But then, gradually, unnerving images intrude. Horned devils and bleeding fingers enter the picture. Close-ups of men’s bodies recur. The girl barely comments on these, as though dissociated from them. By the film’s shocking end, we understand that she is not like all kids. She has been raped.
Turkey doesn’t have a big presence in the animation world, and films from or about the country rarely go far. Ayce Kartal’s works are a striking exception. Having studied animation in Turkey, Australia and New York, he made a splash in 2013 with Backward Run, a fiery snapshot of the Gezi Park protests. He returns to socio-political subject matter with the largely French-produced Wicked Girl, which spotlights the horror of child sexual abuse. This happens everywhere, of course, but the film’s title reminds us of the stigma attached to victims in some parts of the world.
Animation is the perfect medium for the story. While conducting research, Kartal found that most young rape victims had succumbed to schizophrenia, resorting to terrifying fictions to process an incident they couldn’t understand. Animated in fleet pen strokes – Kartal made over 10,000 drawings on a Wacom tablet – the images in Wicked Girl constantly shift between memory and fantasy, never settling. When the mood darkens, lines thicken and black dominates. The film is disorienting, on first viewing at least, although Piste Rouge’s sharp sound design anchors us to some extent.
For practical reasons too, it’s unclear whether Wicked Girl could have been made another way. Kartal scoured Turkey for an actress to narrate the film. In the end, only one family gave permission for their daughter to take part, on the condition that she wouldn’t be shown the finished film (a testament to how effectively the visuals expand on the voiceover). A child acting in a live-action film would be all the more exposed; the parents might well have said no.
Kartal has taken a hugely ambitious premise and turned it into a stylish, harrowing, deeply sensitive film. He’s been rewarded with a remarkable festival run, which has included prizes at Annecy and Clermont-Ferrand. For the home stretch, Wicked Girl is aiming for a nomination at the César Awards. It deserves one.