At the beginning of “Mustang,” an incisive calling card from first-time feature co-writer and director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, school’s out for five orphaned teenage sisters living in a northern Turkish village. The youngest, Lale (Günes Sensoy), is having a hard time saying goodbye to her favorite teacher, who’s off to Istanbul on extended holiday. Like Moscow in Chekhov’s plays, the Turkish metropolis serves as an elusive symbol of freedom here, just out of reach.
But Ergüven, who co-wrote “Mustang” with Alice Winocour, is no mordant realist. There’s an element (whether you buy it completely or not) of storybook confinement and escape to this narrative. The girls live with their grandmother (Nihal Koldas, who clucks like a chicken under distress) and their stern uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekcan). They cannot comprehend these girls, with their Westernized ways, their budding sexuality, their jean shorts and flagrant disregard for what it means to be a dutiful, submissive woman in this corner of the world.
The village gossips paint the sisters as harlots, simply because they enjoy a game of chicken in the water with some local boys. Grandmother and uncle respond by confining them, more or less, in their house not far from the Black Sea. The house becomes, as narrator Lale tells us, “a wife factory,” ruled by lessons in proper dolma preparation, medically sanctioned “virginity reports” and, in one exuberant act of defiance, a clandestine outing to join the female villagers for a soccer match in a neighboring town.
The issues at play in “Mustang” are gravely serious but the tone and rhythm is brisk, headlong and intelligently lively, like the women at the center. The script doesn’t always take the time, and the room, to explore the adversities that make up these siblings’ lives. Likewise, the recurring appearances of a sympathetic local truck driver feel more convenient than convincing. Yet there’s a wealth of feeling in “Mustang,” a sense of time passing quickly even as the patriarchal traditions refuse to budge. The only thing for a young woman in these circumstances, the movie argues, is to plot an escape.
Some Turkish critics (male, of course) have objected to “Mustang’s” portrayal of modern provincial Turkey, and to Ergüven’s depiction of Muslim men as unbending authority figures. This is narrative fiction. And it’s an efficient yet expansive feature debut.
