Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s impressive debut Mustang is brightly contemporary in its small-town setting, yet the family guardians at the heart of it are coldly unflinching in their strict adherence to tradition. Federico Garcia Lorca’s classic Spanish play The House of Bernardo Alba - itself adapted as an equally impressive film by Carlos Saura - must have surely inspired this work, which glows and pulses with a life force that is cruelly suppressed in the interests of family honour.
Five adolescent daughters are effectively locked up after a neighbour reports that they have been horse-playing with boys at the nearby beach in provincial Turkey. Bars are put on the windows and walls heightened, as the grandmother and her son - the girls' uncle - oversee the girls' incarceration. Mother and son are guardians to the girls, although guarding is a moot point given what we know by the film’s close, by which point tragedy has occurred. But there are many light, humorous touches too in this absorbing film.
The girls’ parents died some years ago, and the surviving adult family members believe they have every right to deny the girls normal social interaction with boys. Nor indeed are the young 'uns taking it on the chin, and much of the movie deals with their defiant efforts to steal away, not just from uncle and granny, but from aunts and busy-body neighbours too.
Mustang remains skittish and teen movie for much of the first half, but as arranged marriages and pathetic manipulation come into play, the tone gets serious and ultimately more tragic. Despite all their sibling teasing, the girls are bound together by a touching loyalty. Nevertheless, despite a brave fight, that loyalty and sense of 'us against them' cannot win the five sisters the simple thing they want in the end - freedom.
Mustang builds majestically towards a wonderful denouement in Istanbul, the images soaked in an austerely beautiful string-laden motif composed by Warren Ellis of the Bad Seeds. Mustang is a strikingly original, if disturbing film, which certainly deserves to be seen by us all.
Paddy Kehoe
