Last night I saw Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s film Mustang about five beautiful, orphaned sisters being duly oppressed in a Turkish village. The film has been compared to Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides because of its “dream-like intensity and mostly female cast,” but it made me think of Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The soft-focus, the beauty and nymph-like youth of the girls who function more as a sensual ensemble rather than fully fleshed out individuals, their otherworldly mystery (a kind of bafflement that appeals deeply to the male gaze) and the intimacy of shots capturing them in various states of undress, are all reminiscent of Weir’s atmospheric film.
It’s a v French aesthetic and certainly reflects Ergüven’s sensibilities – she studied and lives in Paris, the cosmopolitan daughter of a Turkish diplomat. What doesn’t ever gel in this story though, is its location in a nondescript Black Sea village.
The film makes a feminist statement by fetishizing the girls’ bold rebellion against a patriarchal, small-minded, asexual backdrop, but the question that I wanted to ask throughout, and which Selin Gökcesu asked in her excellent review “Five French girls walk into an Anatolian village,” was: how did a tiny backward village produce these Bardot-like, free spirited, European-looking creatures (down to their swimsuits, Converse shoes, skinny jeans and uninhibited sexual ease)?
The girls are completely alienated from their grandmother, who’s supposed to have raised them after the death of their parents, and everyone else around them. Perhaps that makes it easier for Western audiences to relate to them and be awestruck by their defiance, but it doesn’t make any sense.
This bizarre disconnect is impossible to ignore, and so the relentless tyranny suffered by the sisters becomes an operatic performance, rather than something urgent and real.
The film won four César awards in France and was the French submission for the best foreign-language film Oscar. Ergüven thinks it’s a surprising choice considering France’s questionable relationship with Islam and Muslim women in particular. I think not so much.