Filming of the Turkish drama Mommo was immensely aided, I imagine, by real-life brother and sister Mehmet and Elif Bulbul playing Ahmet and Ayse, the children at the center of the tale.  The two have a natural closeness that probably would have been hard to duplicate otherwise—and that very closeness is at the heart of the monstrous realities trying to rip them apart.

This is a story about orphans—who shouldn’t be.  Ahmet’s and Ayse’s mother has recently died; but their father is very much alive, after a fashion.  Rather than spend much time mourning, however, he instead finds another wife, one with a ready-made family and no room in her heart (or home) for step-children.  So in this fairy-less tale, the children’s father gets to play the shiftless step-parent to his own children, making plans to ship them to a “children’s home” rather than care for them himself.  Their well-being is literally left in the lap of their maternal grandfather.

The grandfather, however, is himself in failing health and pins all his hopes (and those of his grandchildren) on the long-shot of adoption by his other daughter, who has emigrated to Germany.  But because Plan A looks so shaky, he also has to seriously consider Plan B: essentially entering the five-year-old Ayse into a childhood of endentured servitude to well-heeled friends of friends.

As the film languidly and lovingly follows Ahmet and Ayse through their daily lives—playing soccer, building dams in the local irrigation ditch, watering the rose that grows over their mother’s grave, sleeping under the stars on the stoop of their decrepit home—the children fall increasingly under the looming threat of Mommo, the “bogeyman” that Ayse imagines dwelling in a hole in the house’s wall.  What the children don’t know—and don’t even really learn, as they are just the unwitting pawns of their own lives—is that the monster you don’t know is often far worse than the monster you imagine.

While the appeal of Mommo to American audiences may be its depiction of criminally irresponsible parenthood, what many viewers may miss is the chance the movie provides for a glimpse into our own not-too-distant cultural past.  In cultures that place far less value on leisure that ours does today, children have always represented a blessing styled as “a quiver full of arrows” by the Old Testament—but not because they are merely so many little bundles of joy.  For most of human history, that blessing has been very utilitarian in nature: a means to a family’s livelihood, hands to work the fields, a help with the household chores.  And history is rife with examples of children whose parents deem expendable because they have become simply another mouth or two too many to feed… and examples of parents who have simply run away because they find themselves unable to cope with the pressures of feeding them.

In less developed countries, state-run orphanages are also a far less attractive option than contemporary American foster-family placement (which can also be pretty monstrous).  A decade ago, I visited a pre-EU, post-Soviet Romanian orphanage—and in the dead of winter, the government cut off the orphanage’s power due to budget cuts.  Power was only restored through the generosity of an American charity.

I nonetheless have to admit that the conclusion of this beautifully-filmed if slow-moving based-on-a-true-story tragedy caught me rather off-guard.  I guess I was expecting something that felt more like Slumdog Millionaire or The Italian (or even The Grapes of Wrath).  But sometimes life is just monstrous.

Mommo is unrated, but would probably warrant nothing more than a PG rating from the MPAA for thematic content.  Younger children could possibly be traumatized by the hopelessness of the child heroine’s plight.

Courtesy of the film’s distributor, Greg screened a promotional DVD of Mommo.