Mustang is a coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of conservative rural life in Turkey. The film is director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut, and is nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
The narrative focuses on five adolescent orphaned sisters living with their overbearing uncle and grandmother. The story offers a commentary on the vast differences between the western culture and society we’re so accustomed to and its influences on other parts of the world that still cling to old traditions and beliefs.
The film begins with the sisters going to the beach with some boys from school on the way home one day, only to be admonished by their grandmother on their return home and even more severely by their uncle later on.
As the uncle and grandmother take more and more extreme measures to shield the girls from the outside world and any experiences they believe to be unbecoming of young women, the girls begin to become more and more defiant.
The windows to the house are soon barred and a gate is installed as the girls are pulled out of school and instead begin being taught how to be proper wives and mothers by the other female family members. Some sisters make compromises and accept their fate and place in the world, while some continue to rebel in even more extreme ways as a tug-of-war develops between the girls’ efforts to live life on their own terms and their family’s attempts to pacify them and mould them into suitable wives-to-be.
The film explores the different ways the five sisters deal with their family and culture’s expectations of them. In an ever-more connected and progressive world, the film offers an insight into the different ways people react to their changing environments. Acceptance of tradition and compliance to outright defiance and rebellion, and the different ways in which the sisters act out these emotions.
Each sister’s unique approach to their shared fate offers insight into the struggles of living in a male-dominated and theocratic society. The story offers some somewhat ambiguous hope with each girl’s story, their destinies largely determined by their own actions or lack of—even in the face of their family’s dominance.
Overall the movie is well-scripted and acted, a touching and engaging look into a very real world that can sometimes be forgotten and overlooked in modern mainstream cinema.
