Showing five young sisters all seeking to break free from their conservative grandmother’s iron grip, Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang has a potentially activist message but delivers it very meekly.
Turkey/France
3.5*
Director:
Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Screenwriters:
Deniz Gamze Ergüven
Alice Winocour
Directors of Photography:
David Chizallet
Ersin Gok
Running time: 95 minutes
In Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s delightful Mustang, carefree childhood runs up against the brick wall of tradition as five teenage sisters do all they can to defy their uncompromisingly conservative grandmother. Not without reason, the grandmother serves a mostly symbolic function and has no name.
Although the film takes its sweet time giving them each a barely distinct personality, they are, from eldest to youngest: Sonay, Selma, Ece, Nur and Lale. In a small Turkish town on the coast of the Black Sea where they have grown up under the iron hand of their grandmother, the girls spend their afternoon on the final day of term frolicking with their school mates in the ocean. When they return home, their grandmother rakes them over the coals for allegedly “pleasuring themselves” on the boys’ necks. In fact, they merely sat on their shoulders. But clearly, the grandmother’s imagination is running wild with sexual fantasies. So, too, does the mind of their live-in uncle, Erol, who assumes the girls have somehow lost their virginity in the process.
Before long, the grandmother starts insisting that the girls get married, lest they spoil themselves as teenagers and no longer suitable marriage material. She turns the house into a “wife factory”, where the sisters are instructed how to do all the work a good wife is expected to perform, from cooking to making the bed. But interaction with boys remains strictly off-limits.
All of this already feels like the dark ages, but things get even more insane about halfway through, when Selma, one of the first sisters to get married, completes her wedding night consummation. Outside the door, the in-laws are waiting impatiently for the bedsheet so that they can see proof of their new daughter-in-law’s ruptured virginity on her wedding night. As well as anything else in the film, this particular scene shows how the girls’ domestic situation is really part of a broader social problem.
There are fleeting moments of freedom, however, like when the girls manage to escape the house to watch a football match or make out with a boy they fancy. But every so often, more burglar bars are added, and the walls get higher. When the eldest girls leave home, we start noticing single Uncle Erol behaving ever more curiously, as does Ece. And when Ece is no longer at home, her younger sister, Nur, bears the brunt of Erol’s attention. This abuse is conveyed in a very fragmented and cursory way, although it does a very good job of exposing the absurd sexual repression he has imposed on his nieces.
But we are particularly attuned to this abuse because it seems to have a moving target – that is, moving ever downward – with Lale, the youngest sister likely being the inevitable ultimate target. Once we realise this, Mustang establishes its ticking clock. (The title is never explained, although the notion of roaming freely like a group of fillies, or the inability to do so, is central to the narrative.) We see most of the action from the perspective of Lale, who even turns up, wholly unnecessarily, to deliver some sporadic voice-over narration.
Her opening words perfectly encapsulate the circumstances: “It’s like everything changed in the blink of an eye. One moment we were fine, then everything turned to shit.” On the same day when Lale’s favourite teacher, Ms Dilek, moves a thousand kilometres away to Istanbul, the five girls’ seemingly nonchalant existence is upended when nosy villagers report on their alleged promiscuity at the beach. Nothing will ever be the same again, even though, presumably, things were already pretty dire before. But this fact makes their surprise at the repercussions (the family’s overreaction) a bit difficult to swallow, given they have lived with these horribly myopic people their whole lives.
It is commendable that the sisters all stick together, more or less, but it makes them a homogenous group without distinct personalities. It would have been infinitely more interesting if one or more showed honest doubts about either following the traditional path or cutting one’s one path. No such struggle is on display, which makes the narrative terribly simplistic in its approach to an issue such as female identity in tradition-oriented Turkey.
In her début feature film, the director mostly sidesteps melodrama, even though the film’s opposition to the traditional roles of women in Turkish society shines through. The assertive girls are rewarded with what they want, while their unassertive counterparts struggle to do the same. Unfortunately, their genuine desires are not always clear because we learn so little about their wants and needs.
This scratching of the surface extends to the treatment of issues that are arguably just as serious as (and complement) women’s rights to control their own lives, like Erol’s sexual abuse of his nieces, which is treated so lightly as to be almost invisible.
On the whole, however, Mustang offers a warm-hearted and hopeful story of and for 21st-century women in Turkey who seek to make their own decisions.