Mustang (2015)

Five sisters in conservative, rural Turkey find the net of tradition closing around them in this eloquent and gorgeous debut feature from Deniz Gamze Ergüven. After they’re seen playing with boys at the beach, a nosy neighbour tells their family, inciting patriarchal fears about their marriageability and their sexual corruption. An early scene features them being taken to the doctor so he can confirm that their hymens are intact and they remain virgins – the matter-of-fact acceptance of this violation by all involved is chilling.

There is a loose age cluster of three older sisters – the liberated Sonay, the resigned and apathetic Selma, the impish and rebellious Ecce – and two younger sisters – Nur and Lale, who serves as the narrator and offers a perspective by turns childish and curiously cynical and penetrating. Regardless of the age gap, they’re united in a way which seems to transcend their individual identities – they blur together in dreamy montages featuring them packed into a single bedroom, enjoying a playful physical closeness, one soul in five bodies. The sisters are orphans, raised by their grandmother and living under the roof of a domineering, violent uncle, the patriarch Erol. They have been given free rein by their grandmother rather than routinely crushed into obedience, which makes them unused to the sudden strictures of barred windows, high walls, and the shapeless dresses – denounced by Lale as excrement-coloured– they’re made to wear to preserve their modesty.

For all that the social issues make the film sound preachy or political, Mustang’s ideological ambitions never interfere with its art. Its explorations of masculine possessiveness and insecurity are woven seamlessly into the narrative – when Selma’s wedding night doesn’t result in the blood-stained sheet which is prized by the husband’s family as (disturbingly medieval) proof of a virgin wife, her husband suspects he’s been duped and takes her to the hospital so the doctor can inspect her for the second time. A still, minimalist shot takes in Selma lying on the berth with a sort of impassive discomfort, as the doctor probes off-screen. Her hymen was present all along – her husband simply couldn’t penetrate it. It’s an elegant comment on how the girls have been objectified and dehumanised to assuage the pride of weak men.

While those elements of society are given their just – and stomach-turning – representation, Mustang doesn’t dwell on misery. The girls are vibrantly alive, finding ways around paranoid familial monitoring, high walls, and forced marriages. Not all of them make it – but they rarely resign. A particularly beautiful sequence has them escape from the house to go to a football match in Istanbul. When they wind up appearing on TV as part of the crowd, their grandmother and their aunts must scramble to prevent their uncle and the other men from seeing, which leads to a deliciously comic solution. There’s an interesting distinction between the gentler, more discreet tactics used by the women and the simple violence of the uncle, Erol. Their scramble to save the girls is a rare moment of female solidarity across generations. But when the girls return from the match, it’s their grandmother who has the house walls raised and locked gates installed. She’s the one who knows that Erol is sexually abusive, but doesn’t go to the police. She’s the one who has them married off, happily or otherwise. Even the women are complicit in the oppression of their nieces and granddaughters.

While Mustang occasionally delves into montage, it's for the most part a naturalistic film (albeit with beautiful, saturated cinematography which gives it a hallucinatory shimmer), stringing together incidents of cause and effect, sibling banter, and vignettes of household routines. The life of the sisters is neither all misery nor the happy childhood it should be. Being trapped in their situation, they accept the presence of inequality and oppression without fully reconciling themselves to it. There’s no thesis-statement scene where they have a philosophical debate over the rights of women with their elders – luckily for Erol, who could have scarcely moved beyond the repellent platitudes which come from his educational TV programs (‘Women are too bold nowadays – where are the women who blush when men look at them?’) if challenged on the point. The film’s retort to this imprisonment is made ably by taking the perspective of the sisters and showing them both for the blossoming young women and the playful children they are. In its world, the former must be stifled – the latter robbed of innocence. Thankfully, though Mustang is unsparing in its depiction of the realities of life as a young girl in backwater Turkey, it has the heart to give the girls some freedom.