French backed-Mustang, set in Turkey, has global girl-power message
Coming-of-age tale of repression and perseverance in a small Turkish village
An energising, word-of-mouth upstart that has become not only an Oscar nominee but also the toast of awards shows and festivals around the globe, Mustang in many ways feels like the right movie at the right time.
Directed by Deniz Gamze Erguven in her feature debut (she also co-wrote the film with Alice Winocour), the film is a bittersweet story of repression and perseverance, told with a style that is both languid and muscular, prison-break propulsive and artfully pensive.
Though a story set in Turkey and in the Turkish language, the film was submitted by France for the foreign-language Academy Award, chosen over previous Oscar nominee Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan, a film that won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. (Mustang was eligible because of French financing and producers.)
The film serves as both a specific story about Turkey and also as a broader allegory for challenges faced by young women around the world. In the film, five orphaned sisters live with their uncle and grandmother in a village on the Black Sea. After they are wrongly reported for inappropriate behaviour while playing with some boys on a beach, they are made prisoners in their own home, with severe restrictions over what they wear, where they go and what they do. Individually and together, the girls struggle for independence and their own identities, trying to do nothing more than just be themselves.
“Even if it seems like it’s telling a story from a little village in Turkey, it’s actually a universal issue,” says actress Elit Iscan, 22. “I think every woman is facing some kind of inequality in her life, whether once or many times, so I think everyone is finding something from their lives.”
The actresses – Iscan, Gunes Sensoy, Ilayda Akdogan, Doga Zeynep Doguslu and Tugba Sunguroglu – seem as if they could really all be related, with their ease and apparent closeness with one another. (Only Iscan had acted in a film before.) Erguven, 37, comes across among them as a mix of surrogate mother, cool aunt and amused older sister.