Mustang (Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015) : France/Germany/Turkey/Qatar

Reviewed by Nathan Pécout. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, at the Lobero Theatre.

When Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s first full length feature film hit the screen in 2015, it was an immediate sensation. The film was selected for the 2015 Cannes Festival, and will compete in the 2016 Oscars.

Set on the north coast of Turkey, the film tells the loss of freedom of five teenage sisters. The film begins with long shots of the sea, and girls playing innoncently (not in everybody’s opinion) with boys, then heading back home after their last day of school. But according to their grandmother and their uncle, their behavior was obscene and justifies an imprisonment in the family house. From this point, they will not go out and learn how to be good wifes, in prevision of their planned weddings. The shots become medium, the house being rather big, but still show the closed space where the five sisters are now confined. Their only way of escaping is through windows, by looking at the open space they aren’t allowed to explore anymore, or for the oldest one by receiving messages from her boyfriend. But these windows will be barricaded, one after the other, to cut every communication with the outside world. Each sister will adopt a different behavior toward their unavoidable fate : the oldest one, Sonay, accepts her condition pretty well and negotiates her wedding with her boyfriend; Selma drinks alcohol and pretends to be an easy girl; the third one, Ece, suffers in silence; Nur, who has to bear the frequent rapes of her uncle, is maybe the one who endures the most; but Lale, the youngest one, won’t give up. Only a night flight will bring her back to light and to the wide open freedom.

Even though the girls are locked in the house, this trap has a relatively relaxing aspect. The colors of the film are very bright, the editing is slow, the music aerial. The girls carry their boredom by making themselves into a cosy cocoon illustrated through a filtered design. Here the parallel with Sofia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides (1999) is unavoidable : the five sisters, the house as a prison, the oniric atmosphere, the fear of boys. But Ergüven incorporates a theme that is exclusive to her film : the concept of forced wedding.

According to Deniz Gamze Ergüven, Turkey has regressed in terms of women rights these last years, and this idea is important to her, the film being inspired by her own family’s story. Here, the oppression of patriarchy is represented by the authoritarian uncle, who calls his nieces whores for playing with boys and wants to marry them as soon as possible, but frequently rapes one of them. The film calls the attention to the comeback of such a social structure in Turkey, and questions not only on the position of young women by denouncing the aberration of forced marriage, but also on the one of older women. Because if the grandmother and aunts participate to the setting of those weddings, teach the girls to become perfect housewives and seem convinced of what they are doing, they do not hesitate to cover their girls’ misbehavior to protect them from their uncle.

Rooted in the gender conflicts of today’s Turkish society, Mustang is a film that has its own identity, from the fact that it pictures a society as different as it is similar to the Western one (this way it emancipates from the comparison with Virgin Suicides), and shows a profoundly reflective aspect in addition of being very agreeable to watch.