Critic: Mustang

Dir: Deniz Gamze Erguven

Official Selection International Feature: Turkey

The Richter Scale says: No one escapes growing up. We can spend our lives running away from a lot of things, including the repression of women in small villages in Turkey, but no one escapes the changes in one’s body or the changes in our society’s expectations of us, or the desires and responsibilities that come with growing older. Mustang, Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s feature-length debut, tells the story of five sisters, each in a different stage of adolescence, who one day realize the games they used to play with boys their own age are no longer seen as something that’s okay in the village they grew up in. Now they spend their days locked in a house that increasingly looks more like a prison, learning how to be wives.

The theme of women and their lack of freedom among these parts of the world is so well-known in cinema nowadays (it’s a topic that many women of those regions touch upon) that it gets more and more difficult to find a fresh spin on it. This one focuses on that repression in contrast to the relationships between these sisters, the secrets they tell each other, the games they play, and we see it all through the eyes of Lale, the youngest of the five sisters and the one who is closest to still being a child. Lale loses her sister, one by one, to arranged marriages and the expectations society has on women once they’re married and now she’s looking for a way out before she gets married off.

The film’s approach to the subject is not a subtle one (there’s a repressing uncle whose characterization in particular feels broadly sketched out), but the film gets away with it be making it clear that we’re seeing it through the point of view of a Little girl who isn’t ready to grow up. As such, that lack of ambiguity turns into an asset by showing respect for the adolescent mind. The adolescent mind often takes unnecessary risks for the sole purpose of trying something new or to obtain just a little freedom. Newcomer Günes Sensoy is a revelation as Lale, this girl who is growing up even though she doesn’t feel she’s ready to (and she may not feel ready to for a while still) and both her and the filmmaker take the character to a conclusion that might test our credibility, but one that feels right for this particular journey.