'Mustang': Review

Director: Deniz Gamze Ergüven. Turkey. 2015. 97mins

In Mustang, what begins as a playful look at five young women’s rebellion against their strict upbringing soon becomes something far more stirring and emotional. First-time feature director Deniz Gamze Ergüven has crafted a story of female empowerment which is attuned to the buoyancy of adolescence, but she’s also deeply critical of a modern Turkish patriarchy in which women still struggle to be equal citizens. Buoyed by a cast led by appealing newcomer Güneş Nezihe Şensoy, Mustangis a deceptively simple tale bearing an urgent message.

Ergüven, who cast mostly unknowns, emphasises the sisters’ camaraderie, which comes through in every laughing conversation and tense scheming scene.

Screening in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes,Mustang has sold widely internationally, including a North America pick-up by Cohen Media Group in North America which has planned an early 2016 release. Critical word-of-mouth will boost this film without any stars, althoughMustang’s young-women-boarded-away plot may remind art-house viewers of The Virgin Suicides, drawing additional interest.

The story takes place in a small Turkish community where Lale (Şensoy), the youngest of five sisters, narrates what happened after a neighbour mistakenly confused their harmless goofing-around with a bunch of boys as sexual deviancy. The sisters’ parents have been dead for a decade, and their overly protective uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekcan) decides that these girls have too much freedom, forbidding them to leave the house and forcing them into arranged marriages. Slowly but surely, though, Lale and her siblings — who range from grade-school age to teenagers — will struggle against their uncle’s oppression.

Working from a script she co-wrote with Alice Winocour (who directed the Un Certain Regard selection Disorder), Ergüven takes her time laying out the subtle psychological horrors weighing on these girls. Initially,Mustang has a winning breeziness, as the feisty Lale and her equally spirited sisters — particularly eldest sibling Sonay (İlayda Akdoğan), who drives the local boys crazy — flaunt their blossoming sexuality, conspiring against their conservative uncle and reactionary grandmother (Nihal Koldaş).

These young women make for delightful company, but soon Ergüven ups the ante as Erol imposes harsher restrictions, eventually leaving them locked up in their house as if it was a prison. A similar circumstance faced the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, but Mustang’s claustrophobic setting also recalls the twisted Greek drama Dogtooth, in which manipulative parents tricked their children into believing that leaving the family home would be dangerous.

Mustang never becomes as demented as Dogtooth, but the sickening subjugation of these women becomes increasingly infuriating, and Ergüven does a marvelous job putting us in the mindset of her protagonists, trapping us right along with them. Adding to the irritation is Pekcan’s expertly deplorable performance as the girls’ uncle, the character’s condescending, brusque attitude a pungent stand-in for a society that believes it knows best how young women should comport themselves.

With five main characters, Mustang can sometimes be overwhelmed by personalities, making it difficult to tell individual sisters apart. But Ergüven, who cast mostly unknowns, emphasises the sisters’ camaraderie, which comes through in every laughing conversation and tense scheming scene. As the movie’s narrator and central focus, Şensoy is radiant, her natural charm crucial as we watch Mustang move into tragic and more melodramatic terrain in its second half. At first, Lale’s indignant behaviour can seem a little bratty. But after the humiliations these sisters face during Mustang, it becomes obvious that, if anything, she has a right to be even more enraged than she already is.

Production companies: CG Cinéma, Bam Film, Vistamar Filmproduktion, Uhlandfilm, Canal +, Ciné+, ZDF/ARTE                                          

Producer: Charles Gillibert

Screenplay: Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Alice Winocour

Cinematography: David Chizallet, Ersin Gok

Editor: Mathilde Van de Moortel

Production designer: Serdar Yemisci

Music: Warren Ellis

Main cast: Güneş Nezihe Şensoy, Doğa Zeynep Doğuşlu, Elit İşcan, Tuğba Sunguroğlu, İlayda Akdoğan, Nihal Koldaş, Ayberk Pekcan

Mustang review

“Selma is a one of a kind.” While the statement is true, the sentiment is a lie. Moments before, the handwringing great aunt and co-warden to five “troubling” Turkish sisters was just about to marry off the eldest, Sonia. When Sonia revolted and threatened to scream before both assembled families, she was quickly swapped out for daughter number two.

The five girls live in a sizeable, well-furnished home “a thousand kilometres from Istanbul,” but a century from any notion of women’s rights. With their parents dead, they are raised by their grandmother, an aunt and a temperamental uncle whose main concern in life is the state of the girls’ hymens.

“If they are sullied it is your fault!” he shouts at the increasingly panicked grandmother. An opening sequence, a wholly innocent bit of splashing around with boys at the beach, begins a fusillade of arranged marriages, soldered window bars and unplugged telephones. Any clothing other than formless brown gowns (“the colour of shit”) are verboten when men are around. “Our house became a wife factory,” the youngest, Lale (Gunes Sensoy), describes via voiceover.

With spirited Lale as our eyes and ears, we are spared some of the indignities of her older sisters. These include trips to (male) doctors for virginity inspections and, it is later revealed, midnight visits from their barbaric uncle. This later point is slowly revealed to us, and to Lale – at first he’s just the jerk who won’t let her watch football matches, but as the film progresses, the stakes are raised to levels of life and death.

While the subject matter is enraging, the film is not without warmth and occasional levity. The cloaks the girls must wear are quickly tossed when they are alone. Breasts and buttocks in rainbow-coloured underwear are a recurring motif meant not to titillate but as bursts of naturalism. Caged indoors, the girls maintain a close physicality to defend against boredom, light pouring in as they rumble about on some fabulous Oriental carpets.