Deniz Gamze Ergüven (2015)
In the opening scene of Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut feature, a scrum of adolescent girls and boys, on the last day of the school term, bid farewell to their teacher, who is moving from the rural coastal area where Mustang is mostly set to Istanbul. The schoolgirls include five sisters. The youngest of them, Lale (Güneş Şensoy), is in tears about the departure of the teacher Dilek (Bahar Kerimoglu). Her elder sisters make affectionate fun of Lale. In the film’s final sequence, Lale arrives at a house in Istanbul with the next youngest sister, Nur (Doğa Doğuşlu). A man opens the door and Lale asks for Dilek. The latter is surprised to see Lale but, when the girl hugs her and doesn’t let go, Dilek returns the embrace. A lot has happened in Lale’s family since she last saw her former teacher.
Before that first school scene, there’s a very brief voiceover from Lale. ‘One moment we were fine,’ she says, ‘then everything turned to shit’. That turning point occurs as soon as the sisters are home from school. It’s a lovely, sunny day and, rather than taking the bus, the girls head home along the beach with a group of the boys. Things get boisterous: the girls sit on the boys’ shoulders and try to knock each other off into the water. The juxtaposition of these early sequences is metaphorically apt – the end of school, the start of girls and boys spending free time together – and the first example of one of Mustang‘s repeated, if not consistent, strengths: Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s ability to invest and animate symbolically significant moments in the story with a vivid reality. As soon as the girls get back home, they’re fiercely rebuked by their grandmother (Nihal Koldaş). The mucking about with the boys – witnessed by others in the local community – is judged to be not horseplay but whores’ play, and the girls’ school days are literally over. The head of the household, their uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekcan)[1], is so appalled by their behaviour that he refuses to let his nieces continue to leave the house even to attend school. Instead, they are taught housekeeping skills by their grandmother and other female relatives.
Ergüven’s fusion of the real and the morally exemplary is a rare happy marriage in Mustang. The plot is driven by the attempts made to marry off the sisters, in turn, to men deemed by the family elders to be suitable husbands. Strong-willed Sonay (İlayda Akdoğan), the eldest girl, already has a boyfriend and succeeds in marrying him. The second sister, Selma (Tuğba Sunguroğlu), is saddled with Osman (Erol Afşin): on their wedding night, she fails to bleed and is immediately marched by her scandalised in-laws to hospital, where a doctor examines Selma and confirms that the hymen remains intact. (Selma’s conversation with the doctor makes a strong impression through being played so matter-of-factly.) As her marriage approaches, the behaviour of the middle sister, Ece (Elit İşcan), becomes increasingly erratic. She commits suicide. Nur’s wedding ceremony is about to get underway when the determined Lale launches her escape plan. This moment too has both a metaphorical charge and a dynamic reality. The uncle has built fortifications to the family home, to make it literally more difficult for the girls to get out. The traditional start of the wedding ceremony, as described in earlier examples in the film, is for the groom and his family to seek admittance to the bride’s home; part of this ritual involves brief, light-hearted ‘playing hard to get’ on the part of the bride. Lale and Nur do just that: they trick their uncle and grandmother into stepping outside when the groom’s party arrives then lock the door. They shut the wedding party out of their own prison before getting out of it through an unfortified part of the house.
Lale has been increasingly horrified to watch her elder sisters’ marriages being arranged and to feel the religious and social traditions of the community gather incarcerating force. She is at the centre of other excursions from the family home before her and Nur’s climactic escape. The first of these makes for an audience-pleasing highlight of Mustang which strains credibility, to put it mildly. The final of a football competition is taking place. Because male fans misbehaved at a previous match, they’ve been banned from attending the final and the crowd is women-only. Among the sisters, Lale in particular loves football but isn’t allowed by her uncle even to watch it on television. She learns that other girls from the village are going to the final and persuades her sisters they should go too. They get out of the house, miss the bus and persuade a truck driver to give them a lift. Uncle Erol and his friends are just about to settle down to watch the match at home when the grandmother catches sight of the girls on the television screen, enjoying themselves in no uncertain terms. She and the other men’s female relatives take instant, resourceful action to cut the village’s electricity supply. This girls-just-wanna-have-fun episode provides a couple of nice visual jokes but makes no realistic sense. It’s inconceivable – for reasons both cultural and economic – that attendance at a big (televised) soccer match, and not just a Turkish one, would be restricted to women. (This is such a basic nonsense that it’s not worth going into the subsidiary improbabilities of the occasion.)
Lale next meets the truck driver Yasin (Burak Yigit) when she’s left home to embark on a solo walk to Istanbul, which is hundreds of miles away. Yasin is amused by Lale’s ridiculous idea yet struck by the seriousness of her intent. They meet again and he shows her how to drive. When she and Nur eventually escape from the fortress, they make their immediate getaway in their uncle’s car, with Lale at the wheel. They go only a little way in the hope that Yasin, whom Lale has tried to contact, will pick them up and take them all the way to Istanbul. Yasin is a somewhat idealised figure – a chevalier who ends up as the US cavalry, marked out as different from the other local men by his long hair. (When Lale is trying to contact him to help her and Nur escape, she first phones a man she hopes is his employer and describes Yasin to him as having long hair. The voice on the line says he can’t help: he doesn’t have ‘any queer’ employees.) In spite of the contrived plotting around Yasin, the exchanges between him and Lale are attentively written and nicely played. As the five sisters get out of the truck when he gives them a lift to the football match, it’s Lale who sincerely thanks Yasin – a small but noticeable detail that sows the seed of her subsequent interactions with and reliance on him. He derides her crummy footwear when she’s setting off on the walk to Istanbul; the next time they meet, she’s got hold of a pair of red shoes from one of her elder sisters. The fairytale aspect of the story makes it hard not to see the shoes as ruby slippers.
Mustang has won various prizes and was Oscar-nominated earlier this year for Best Foreign Language Film. It’s also been received with enthusiasm by most critics but not by Nick Pinkerton in Sight & Sound (June 2016). Pinkerton sees the film, ‘with its one-dimensional figures of conservative authority, [as] too narrowly Manichean to allow the troubling ambivalence of multiple perspectives’. He finds the ‘sense of slow smothering … expressed in only the most literal-minded visual terms …there is none of the feeling of mounting cabin fever that might lend terrible immediacy to the offscreen suicide of one of the sisters, precipitated by sexual abuse within the protective walls of home’. Of course Deniz Gamze Ergüven and Alice Winocour, with whom she wrote the screenplay, consider the world view of the grandmother and uncle benighted but the playing of Nihal Koldaş and Ayberk Pekcan (the chauffeur in Winter Sleep) makes their characters more than one-dimensional. Koldaş’s grandmother is an anxiously caring woman; there’s a fine moment when, as they fold laundry, she assures one of the girls that it’s possible to learn to love the husband you’ve been assigned – the grandmother knows this from personal experience. Uncle Erol is irascible at best but Pekcan doesn’t play him as overtly tyrannical: it’s the normality of the man that makes Erol’s abuse of his nieces, in more ways than one, so alarming. The extra dimensions the actors create make the uncle’s and grandmother’s attitudes no more palatable but Nick Pinkerton is wrong to blame this effect on tendentious over-simplifying. How can a film-maker nuance such attitudes? The offscreen suicide – signalled by a gunshot – is too obviously designed to shock but Pinkerton’s complaint of a lack of ‘feeling of mounting cabin fever’ is puzzling. The atmosphere that Ergüven builds within the house is a potent, uneasy mix of stir-craziness and torpor. The girls are like zoo animals, listless yet restless.
In a generally excellent cast, fourteen-year-old Güneş Şensoy is especially good. Under Ergüven’s skilful direction, Şensoy gives Lale a porous intelligence; her observant quality develops into urgent watchfulness. Her intense enjoyment of the driving lesson with Yasin is lovely. Warren Ellis’s music is supple and well used. For example, when Lal is making her getaway with Nur, the score suggests the girls’ desire to leave home with a hint of regret that they have no other option; as they then wait in the dark at the roadside, Lale is so focused on wanting Yasin’s truck to appear, there’s no scope for mixed feelings and no music on the soundtrack. The escape-to-freedom ending is conventional but this hardly detracts from what Deniz Gamze Ergüven has achieved in Mustang. It’s a distinctive and very appealing film.
13 May 2016
[1] If there’s an explanation of what happened to the girls’ parents, I missed it.
