Mustang (2015) Review

Mustang is the debut feature from Turkish director, Deniz Gamze Ergüven. The story concerns five sisters who grow up, locked in their adoptive father’s country estate because an innocuous act, in which all sisters are involved, is misconstrued as shamefully sexual by the adults in their lives. One by one, the sisters are married off at a young age, in an attempt to prevent them from further committing promiscuous acts and to ensure their sacred virginity is preserved for marriage.

The film is told from the perspective of the youngest of the siblings as she witnesses the systematic violence perpetrated by the parental figures against her sisters. She comes to realize that she cannot survive within such a system and commits to escape.

The film acts as obvious political allegory, in which the father-figure represents institutionalized oppression towards women and societal fetishization of girls' youth/virginity. Each sister represents different ways in which young women react to the same form of systematic oppression.

Although I admire Mustang’s unapologetically political nature and believe it tells an important story for this day and age, in this case, the same political quality acts as a double edged sword.

The film exists purely to assert a political opinion which, incidentally, causes to the film to be simplistic.

On the positive side, every character is perfectly cast, the production design reflects a time in childhood when everything seems ideal and when the most serious matter a kid should have to deal with, is whether to walk home from school or take the bus. Although it sags in the middle, the story structure overall is tried and true and the pacing is tight. The film admittedly unravels at the end, but I will get to that. Overall, this is technically a decent film.

Unfortunately, everything in this film is painted in such broad strokes, so in the end, I am forced nit-pick through what details are left to me.

The film opens up strongly enough, with a fantastic opening sequence that promises an unflinching look at the repercussions and issues surrounding female sexuality in an oppressively conservative environment.

However, the film quickly lays all of its cards on the table as it offers its perspectives on such matters immediately. The film soon becomes a repetitive slog of scenes meant to demonstrate how the extreme conservative views of rural folk in Turkey have a negative psychological and tangible impact on the country's young girls. Although there is a recognizable progression in the intensity of the transgressions that the main character witnesses, all trials lead to the same conclusion, which had already successfully been presented in the first 20 minutes.

Every scene articulates the same perspective and ideology. And this ends up feeling cheap, as the other side of the argument is never explored, only demonized. The father figure is only ever a distant, sports obsessed, masculine monster. Because of the story’s point of entry, this partly makes sense because this is how our main character sees him. But, as a member of a western audience, I cannot help but feel like I can only approach this film from a Westerner-High-Horse perspective and say, “Would you look at that! Turkey must be such a backwards place. Thank the lord we treat our women better than in those Muslim countries”. And this is purely because the film is more interested in being a political allegory than a character tale.

And this wouldn’t be a problem if the film had done anything to illustrate the other political perspective, to at least present those character’s reasons for holding such beliefs. But the filmmaker was obviously not interested in anything but endlessly demonstrating what tortures are committed against her country’s most beautiful children.

Because this point of view is so evident from the very beginning and is the only point of view EVER offered, the audience is never invited to come to the same conclusion as the filmmaker, rather commanded.

Furthermore, because the film is so focused on furthering a political agenda, some plot events come off as short sighted. Mainly, a character's suicide ends up feeling like a distasteful plot contrivance because the character's depression is never explored or elaborated on. Something as serious as suicide is glossed over and used only as a tool to further the film's agenda.

Similarly, events at the end of the film are so preposterous, in which the film celebrates an adult who knowingly endangers a child, and it becomes supremely evident that the writer was forced to make several glaring contrivances in order to uphold the film’s message throughout the climax and epilogue.

Overall, this remains a well cast, well acted, well shot film. It is pretty decent and puts forward a worthwhile message. But it does nothing to challenge or to help me explore my political point of view. It is capable only of affirming ideas I already knew I had. And therefore, is entirely forgettable.