The Blue Wave

Returning home from a summer spent at the beach with her family, Deniz, a teenage girl living in the midsize Turkish city of Balikesir, embarks on a year of flirtations, shifting friendships, unfocused restlessness and emotional tumult in this low-key, loosely plotted coming-of-age tale. Entering her penultimate year of high school, Deniz, along with her two best friends, Esra and Gul, and new girl Perin, faces choices that will decide the next chapter of her life. While Deniz contemplates imminent change and acts on some questionable impulses, writer-directors Zeynep Dadak and Merve Kayan avoid fireworks in favor of tracking the quiet, largely internal dramas playing out. These are largely born of Deniz’s mood swings, which lead her into sulky, inarticulate battles with her mother, the clumsy pursuit of her school guidance counselor—fueled by a compound of fervor and fear—and a series of exhilarated shout-alongs with her friends to various pulsing pop teenage anthems. A handful of city-wide power outages that disrupt the status quo mirror Deniz’s sense of disarray and her anxiety and excitement about the future, but the film stays true to its portrait of moody, conflicted adolescence, keeping an intimate focus as Deniz moves ambivalently in the orbit of her family’s habits and traditions and through a series of tiny, monumental crises. –Lynn Rapoport