Imagine the unimaginable: One moment you’re out enjoying a beautiful, sunny day with your friends and your sisters, and the next, your grandmother is slapping you silly for having inappropriate contact with boys. Everything else snowballs from there: You’re whisked off to the doctor for a virginity test, your personal possessions are shut up in a cupboard (along with the telephones), the doors are kept locked and contractors come to reinforce the house you live in with your family, turning it into an improvised prison-cum-wife factory for you and your untamed siblings.
Such is the stuff of Mustang, the debut film of Turkish-French filmmaker Deniz Gamze Ergüven. In a year of great debuts—Appropriate Behavior, The Mend, Slow West, among many—Ergüven’s portrait of five sisters living under the thumb of patriarchy in an isolated Turkish hamlet is the one most likely to sear itself into your memory. It’s a deceptively intimate film with a massive scope, made with so much technique and such a deliberate hand it’s a wonder Ergüven hasn’t been shooting feature films for decades.
Mustang is Ergüven’s neorealist chronicle of femininity bound against its will to draconian gender politics. The film begins with a rough introduction to Ergüven’s five budding young protagonists: Selma (Tu?ba Sunguro?lu), Sonay (?layda Akdo?an), Ece (Elit ??can), Nur (Do?a Do?u?lu) and Lale (Güne? ?ensoy), the youngest of the bunch and the audience’s chief anchor to the narrative. Following innocuous seaside merriments, the children are subject to daily lessons on how to keep house by family and friends, who instruct them on the finer points of preparing dolma, cooking soup and making up the bed. (“There’s nothing you can’t do,” proclaims their aunt during one such lesson—not catching the irony.) Eventually they’re shopped around to potential suitors like cattle at market. All the while, Lale observes, seethes and teaches herself to drive so she can leave forever and make her own way through life.
Mustang’s title makes an obvious and immediate comparison between Ergüven’s quintet and wild horses, unbridled and free to ride the open plains of their world as they choose. What we see throughout Ergüven’s picture, though, are the ongoing efforts of the adults who control that world to keep the girls from engaging in any activity deemed un-ladylike. The goal is to maintain the girls’ matrimonial eligibility, though their female relatives pursue that goal for different reasons than their male relatives. Mustang’s men, represented by the girls’ swine of an uncle, Erol (Ayberk Pekcan), are motivated by a need to maintain a gendered status quo. Erol wants to live in a world where his word must be obeyed—or else—but the film’s women often enforce that same status quo out of a desire to keep the girls safe (such as it is). Even when their grandmother (Nihal G. Koldas) punishes her grandchildren, she does so in hopes that Erol won’t.
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