THE BLUE WAVE (MAVI DALGA) Breakthrough

“Even the ambulance is going somewhere!” This line, said by teen Deniz, captures the adolescent restlessness at the heart of THE BLUE WAVE. Deniz and her friends, all juniors in high school, live in the relatively nondescript, midsize Turkish city of Balikesir. The girls are in a phase when leaving home and “going somewhere” – be it to Istanbul, Ankara, anywhere – is more important than anything else. In the meantime, they make do with a number of distractions, chiefly Deniz’s crush on the school’s guidance counselor. The film deftly shows teen life in all its moody, uneventful glory, as the characters trip through life plugged in to their earbuds, looking for some greater meaning they can only half-articulate. Surreal details – as in a sequence in which the girls tell a haunted fable, or when Deniz meets a shopkeeper with a mechanical larynx – create a world that, while unimpressive to its characters, holds strange wonders for the audience.