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MUSTANG Send This Review to a Friend
Add “Mustang” to your list of must-see films this year. France’s entry into competition for an Oscar in the best foreign film category, “Mustang” is a powerful and suspenseful dramatic story set in Turkey (in Turkish with English subtitles) about five sisters battling to break out of the cultural limitations that govern their lives. In its clever way, the film, astutely directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, gives us a broad view of the society that these young woman find stifling and the hypocrisy that exists. The view of the film’s take on the sisters is heartwarming and makes us root for them. “Mustang” is also extremely timely, as it arrives in the context of the heightened fight for women’s rights the world over.
The film is not preachy. It gains its strength from what it depicts and the personalities of the women. The sisters, who have been orphaned and attending school, go to a remote Black Sea village, where they are in the care of their grandmother, a stern woman whose mission is to marry the girls off one by one in arranged marriages.
The girls bond together, want to enjoy life and not be forced into marriages they don’t want. We see them frolicking innocently in the sea with boys. Getting a fase report from a local busybody that the play was sexual, the sisters’ grandmother is furious and the girls are restricted to staying at home except when being brought out and paraded about the town in hope young men will notice them and seek their hand. At first the grandmother (Nihal Koldas) seems like an ogre, but eventually we see her as one also imprisoned by the cultural attitude toward women.
The five sisters are Lale (Gunes Sensoy), Nur (Dogba Doguslu), Selma (Tugba Sunguroglu), Sonay (Ilayda Akdogan) and Ece (Elit Iscan). We see the situation largely from the perspective of Lale, the youngest, who intermittently narrates, and looks with disdain at what the sisters are being put through.
They are hauled off to doctors for humiliating virginity tests. One is sneaking off and secretly having sex “the back way.” There is the ritual of examing the sheets for blood after a wedding night.
There is an entertaining sequence in which the girls sneak off to attend a soccer game, forbidden to them, and when an aunt sees them on television, she knocks out the power so they are not seen by their uncle, and the village goes dark.
A key character is the uncle, Erol (Ayberk Pekcan), who while adamantly trying to set a moral tone, is secretly and hypocritically abusing one of the girls. His mother, their grandmother, becomes suspicious of what he is doing.
Tension and suspense build in the face of tragedy and Lale leads a revolt with the sister who defies a marriage arrangement. They decide to escape, a tough option given their virtual imprisonment with locked doors and other barricades around the house. One man, a friendly and sympathetic gay salesman, who has befriended them and secretly taught Lale to drive, is called upon to help.
“Mustang,” co-written by director Ergüven and Alice Winocour, is filled with atmosphere of the local area, and cleverly builds to the suspenseful flight for freedom. The film’s name comes from the idea of the sisters being like mustangs, wild, spirited and hard to tame. Watching their effort to achieve empowerment and break free of the fate that is supposed to await them is exciting. No doubt about it, “Mustang” is one of this year’s special and rewarding films. A Cohen Media Group release. Reviewed November 18, 2015.
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