Rent Mustang (2015)

Mustang Lale. - Mustang review by NC

Five sisters have been seen galloping too freely, (in the eyes of arch conservatives who believe that "women must be chaste and pure, know their limits, and mustn't laugh openly in public"), and so are coralled into a prison house by their guardians; the walls and bars closing in and climbing higher after every escape.

It is not only imprisonment the girls have to endure. The house becomes a wife factory as the girls, no longer allowed to go to school, are instead taught how to be nothing more than a domestic servant, ripe for arranged marriages and second-class citizenship. The youngest, Lale, witnessing how the wishes and happiness of her sisters have nothing to do with the future laid out for them, decides she's having none of it, and, no matter the consequences, that running free and wild is better than being tamed into submission.

It's so nearly a five star film. In fact, it probably is, and I'm being overly harsh. The pace is spot-on. The acting is flawless. The script, the photography, the unobtrusive music, are very fine. My only reservations lie with characterisation. The girls' uncle is perhaps too much the cardboard cut-out villain. To make him an abuser may be par for the course for the type of man who thinks women should be subjugated, but it does feel as if we are being told that this is a BAD man, in case we hadn't quite got the message. Then again, maybe the abuse strand had a point insofar as that might be why the grandmother colludes in marrying the girls off in rapid-fire succession. In that way, she is 'rescuing' the girls from his hands.

I also wonder at the way in which the relationship between the sisters is handled. It might be that I'm looking at it through the eyes of a different culture, but they seemed too close, almost inseparable. There wasn't any of the enmity, even hatred, that can fester between siblings, especially at their age. Again, maybe I'm wrong. The girls are orphans after all, and would have had to bond in order to make life easier.

So maybe this is a five star film. It is certainly an excellent one. Deniz Gamze Erguven's debut has all the hallmarks of a great director at work.

Social commentary or Soft Porn? - Mustang review by ST

I did not enjoy this film. I welcomed the fact that it brought to our attention the oppression of women in rural Turkey, and also the oppression of women by other women (here portrayed as old, fat and headscarf-wearing). Unfortunately I thought the characters were all rather crudely and one-dimensionally presented, and there was very little development of them: surely there could have been more to the one older woman who actually helped the girls attend a football match by knocking out the electricity in the village to stop the men seeing them on television? And what about the grandmother who brought them up? Was she conflicted?

But what made me feel uneasy was the sense that this was actually soft porn: the 5 sisters were all stunningly beautiful, beautifully photographed, with lots of scenes of them entwining round one another. I have not been to Turkey, but I did find one Turkish reviewer who said that the film was unrealistic, and I can't imagine that rural Turkish schoolgirls, however liberated they may be, dress like St Trinians, or frolic in the sea with male schoolmates, (which leads inevitably to a wet blouse scene). And were the expletives which were in the subtitles actually how they spoke, or meant deliberately to titillate and shock?

So I was left feeling uncomfortable, and wondering what the motivations of the Cannes jury were.

At least there was a Nick Cave soundtrack.

Girl Aloud - Mustang review by CH

A heartbreaker of a Turkish film, and one of the very best I have watched within the last six months. The feisty youngest sister of four older girls, rebels against a conservative rural upbringing she sees being inflicted upon her and her sisters (who have recently moved from a city suburb to an isolated uncles house after the death of a parent.) There are very dark undertones and implications to the film but they are dealt with sensitively and with enough humour to give this gem of modern Turkish cinema a 5 star rating. Recommend it highly