Review

Mustang

In a comfortable, well-appointed Turkish house "a thousand kilometers" (621 miles) from Istanbul, five sisters are held prisoner.

They made a mistake. They didn't come straight home after school let out for the summer, but instead splashed in the Black Sea with boys. Their games were innocent to them, but not to the neighbor in the dull dress who informed on them to their religiously conservative Uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekcan) who, their parents dead, has undertaken to raise them as virginal brides.

Mustang

88 Cast: Gunes Sensoy, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Tugba Sunguroglu, Elit Iscan, Ilayda Akdogan, Ayberk Pekcan, Nihal G. Koldas

Director: Deniz Gamze Erguven

Rating: PG-13, for mature thematic material, sexual content and a rude gesture

Running time: 97 minutes

They are whipped by their grandmother (Nihal G. Koldas) before being stripped of their cellphones, computers and any clothes that might be deemed immodest. Keys are turned, windows barred, school replaced by cooking lessons. They are hauled off to a clinic so their virginity can be documented. Their social life is restricted to awkward, chaperoned meetings with potential suitors.

The girls -- Lale (Gunes Sensoy), Nur (Doga Zeynep Doguslu ), Selma (Tugba Sunguroglu), Ece (Elit Iscan), and Sonay (Ilayda Akdogan) -- are close enough in age that they might all be married off within a couple of years. Erol sees them as assets he must protect, though the aunts who train them in domestic arts have some empathy.

If the film makes you think of The Virgin Suicides (either Jeffrey Eugenides' book or Sophia Coppola's movie) you are not alone. In some ways it made me think of the Angulo brothers in Crystal Moselle's documentary The Wolfpack, about six brothers locked away in a New York apartment who began re-creating the films they watched with elaborate homemade props. (And, had we more time and space, something could be made for the similarities between this film and Lenny Abrahamson's Room.)

Like the girls of The Virgin Suicides or the boys of The Wolfpack, these sisters long for and eventually achieve release from their circumscription in various ways. Sonay, the oldest, is married off against her will, but when Selma balks at the arranged suitor she's allowed to marry her boyfriend, with whom she has been having a dangerous physical affair. The others watch and wait with various degrees of horror and anticipation.

It is the youngest and most spirited sister, Lale, who most engages our empathy. She has a spark that must be extinguished (she's the mustang that must be broken) to fulfill what her uncle sees as her destiny, and as her sisters come up in turn, we understand she's plotting to do what she must, even if we aren't clear what that could possibly be.

While it's mostly an empathetic observation of young lives, it's possible to read Mustang as an allegorical film about Turkey's drift away from secularism back into a dark, misogynistic fundamentalism. But even though the material occasionally grazes feminist melodrama, director Deniz Gamze Erguven and co-writer Alice Winocour are careful to allow every character, even cruel Erol, a recognizable measure of humanity. The relationship between the older women of the house and the sisters is complicated and tender -- there's a wonderful bit about the girls sneaking out to attend a soccer match (one that males have been barred from attending because they tend to riot) and the lengths one of their aunts goes to cover for them.

But the best part is how Erguven watches these creatures, these lithe little animals who lounge and roughhouse with one another. There's a sweet beauty in their play, a genuine wistfulness as they mourn the lost world beyond the gates, and real steel in their determination to get themselves free.

MovieStyle on 02/12/2016

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