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A Vivacious Spirit Can't Be Locked Down In 'Mustang'

courtesy Cohen Media Group
Tugba Sunguroglu, Ilayda Akdogan, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Elit Iscan, and Gunes Sensoy

Turkish-French filmmaker Deniz GamzeErgüven's Mustang is about the socially-approved comportment of young women in a Turkish village, and it stacks the deck in the girls' favor. Five sisters who range in age from about 12 to maybe 17 are beautiful and lively and full of fun, with a heap of sensuality tossed in.

Basically anything these girls want, the audience will want it for them.

School lets out and the girls bound through the woods with some young boys. They all wear starched, bright white shirts, and the next thing you know, they've run into the surf, frolicking and ducking each other, playing those kinds of boy-girl chases and games that the young play before they're ready for sex. They get wet, the outlines of their bodies stand out. You can't not love these children – at least that's where the movie stands – but when a nosy neighbor complains about immorality, the girls' grandmother has to shut down their fun.

The girls' parents have died and the grandmother is raising them. She doesn't much like to inhibit their fabulous spirits, but the uncle who also lives there, condemns the grandmother. Now the girls are kept indoors, so that grandma can teach them to cook and serve their future husbands. As the youngest of the five puts it, they have to wear excrement-colored dresses, but she uses a different word. Meanwhile, with every burst of freedom from the girls, the uncle gets more desperate. He puts bars on the windows and welds them shut.

This northern Turkish village doesn't look repressive on the surface. Some women wear headscarves, some don't. At a wedding, men and women dance together; they drink. But the virginity of young women obsesses many of the men. After their seaside escapade, the uncle drags all five girls to a doctor for a virginity examination. To a non-Turkish viewer, the rules look arbitrary and random.

The village itself is as pretty as the girls. It sits amid lush green hills and forest. The sea is nearby; the sun shines. The girls, grandma and the uncle share a comfortable house. It's a place where life is appreciated, except when it comes to the natural enthusiasms and energies of young women.

The uncle is right in what he thinks is going on with his nieces. They are sexual; they are wild. They look like girls in Western Europe or America with their hair long. In the house they wear tank tops and bikinis. They delight in their bodies; they're uninhibited; they have fun.

When she can, the grandmother helps them out. Somehow the girls escape to go to a soccer game in the city – a special game with only women allowed in the stadium. Just before the men at home are about to tune in on television, grandma sees the girls and in a wonderful fit of protective anarchy, she sabotages the TV set, and for good measure, the electricity for the entire village.

Mostly, though, the repression of these lovely girls is no joke. Marriages are arranged, and while daughter number two winds up with her real guy, another sister at their double wedding is simply distraught.

Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, actually lives in France, which may indicate her attitude toward some Turkish ways. She doesn't try to explain the men and lets the audience piece together what social customs and beliefs drive the men to try to snuff out the joys of women.

The feisty life force in these girls simply won't be stifled. When the uncle blocks it in one place, it squirts out somewhere else. Two of the girls barricade the house against him, so he's outside trying to break in, while the girls are trying to break out.

For the film Mustang, it's a fight he will eventually lose.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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