Mustang

When the summer is awash in big budget special effects laden blockbusters, it’s occasionally a good thing to cleanse your cinematic palate with something more subtle and more challenging, something more about the human heart and less about explosions. To this end, I recommend the 2015 Turkish/French film, Mustang. 

 It’s the feature film debut of director Deniz Gamze Erguven, and it tells the story of five sisters living in a rural village in contemporary Turkey. The sisters ranging in age from 17 to 12 are orphans and live with their grandmother and uncle in a big house outside of town. The film opens on the last day of school before summer. After saying goodbye to their teachers, they walk home with some boys and go by way of the beach. While there, they stop and horse around for a while. Among other things, they play chicken, getting on the shoulders of the boys and jousting, seeing who can push who into the water. To western eyes, it looks like sweet, innocent fun. The problems begin when the girls arrive home and Grandma goes ballistic. A busybody from town called her to say that her granddaughters were behaving in a positively immoral and shameful way – getting on the shoulders of boys, getting their school uniforms wet for everyone to see, etc. As mad as Grandma is, their uncle’s anger is worse. He forbids them from leaving the house and begins installing gates and walls around the property to keep the girls inside and under control. He tells them that they won’t be going back to school and instead will just learn how to be proper young women by taking cooking and sewing lessons from some of their female relatives. 

 

The five sisters hate the increased repression and find ways around it. One sister crawls down the drain pipe on the side of the house to meet her lover in the woods. Two of them sunbathe in bikinis, resting their feet against the very bars that keep them captive. The youngest sister, Lale, who is the protagonist of the film, arranges for all the sisters to sneak out to attend a big soccer match in a neighboring town. With each incident, the uncle responds with more locks and bars and higher gates.

What at first just seems extreme and unnecessary soon becomes nightmarish when it becomes apparent that the girls’ uncle is systematically abusing them at night. First the older ones and then the younger ones. The grandma knows what’s happening but also knows that, as a woman, she has almost no power – cultural or legal – to put a stop to it. So instead, she tries to create the one exit for her granddaughters that she can – marriage. The older two get married off quickly – one happily, not very much not – but the other three sisters are trapped. I won’t give away how the film ends except to say that the sisters do not give up. 

 Without being didactic or preachy, the film addresses the question of the female body, who owns it, who is responsible for it. With almost documentary-like presentation, the film shows some of the difficulty and horror of being a woman in a world so often dominated by men who call the shots. The film creates great empathy for the helplessness and yet the profound strength of these women and girls in excruciating circumstances.

The five sisters together are a force of nature. Beautiful, defiant, smart, and irreverent, they make you wish they were your daughters. The sequences of them joking around, comforting each other, and even just being together as they silently lie on the floor of their room in a patch of sunlight with nowhere to go and nothing to do – they are all organic and completely believable. Throughout the film, their long, dark hair is obviously meant to suggest the manes of the wild horses of the title of the film, the mustang, a creature known both for its strength and endurance and also its unwillingness to be tamed. Despite tragedy, repression, abuse, and neglect, the sisters in Mustang refuse to be corralled into the unfair and hurtful expectations of the world they were born into.

If you are craving a film this summer that gives you something to feel and to think about instead of just lame spectacle, check out Mustang.