Meet France’s Oscar Entry, ‘Mustang,’ a Controversial 5-Headed Monster of Femininity

In a remote seaside village in Turkey, school has just let out for the summer. Five long-haired sisters frolic through the waves, still in their school uniforms. They climb atop the shoulders of schoolboys, laughing and splashing in the water, embracing their newfound freedom with abandon. Little do they know that this will be their last taste of such joys. The sisters return home to find that a neighbor has reported their “scandalous behavior.” News travels and the girls’ innocent antics bring shame upon their entire family. Stunned, the girls maintain they were only playing a children’s game, but their protests fall upon deaf ears. Their burgeoning sexuality is now a threat.

To ostensibly restore honor and improve marriage prospects, the orphaned sisters’ guardians — their grandmother and dictatorial uncle — lay siege to the house. The girls are barricaded inside, banned from communicating with the outside world and sentenced to a life of conservative Muslim observance against their will. Thus begins imprisonment in what the sisters come to call the “wife factory.” Elderly village women visit the house in rapid succession to give the sisters lessons in cooking, cleaning and obedience. The girls are to be married off in a harried assembly line. Harrowing violations of their freedoms follow, such as having their hymens inspected to confirm their virginities.

But the girls won’t take it lying down. They create a gravitational force field as captivating as any all-star ensemble cast. One by one, they enact individual moments of heroism; together, they defy the infringements of their personal liberties (some of which could be classified physical or sexual abuse).

For Turkish-born director Deniz Gamze Ergüven, rebellion was not an option. Ergüven lifted the opening scene at the beach directly from her childhood experience, but with one key difference: “The scandal that was triggered was the same,” she said. “But we didn’t react as the characters did. We just looked at our shoes and were completely ashamed.” 

The “Mustang” girls are super-heroic, according to Ergüven. They possess an inordinate amount of courage to subvert traditional values. “No girl would ever act like this,” Ergüven said. “As little girls, our strategy of survival is so different. You get so hit by shame when you’re accused of something, that even when you do have a sense of unfairness, it’s impossible to take action.”

Growing up between Turkey and France afforded Ergüven critical distance from societal confinements. “Though my family was headed by some conservative figures, I could always step back and get out,” she said. But in recent years, as Turkey has undergone a significant reversion to conservative values and politics, Ergüven has grown increasingly discomfited.

“What seemed striking to me is that there’s this filter of sexualization through which women are perceived in Turkey, and it shapes their place in society,” she said. “It’s something that starts at a very early age — as early as the characters in the film. I wanted to question that deeply.”

Though the “Mustang” actresses — Elit Iscan (21), Ilayda Akdogan (17), Güneş Şensoy (14), Doga Zeynep Doguslu (15) and Tugba Sunguroglu (16) — have experienced a liberal youth compared to the characters they portray, they too feel restricted by Turkish gender norms.

“I’m not getting an arranged marriage, but I feel pressure from the society and political figures,” said Iscan. “In the film, there’s a political figure giving a speech about how women should act in public — that happens. In Turkey, men are discussing too much about how women should act.” Doguslu recounted an instance similar to the film’s opening scene. “I was playing with my boyfriends outside, and someone called my grandma to tell her to take better care of me,” she said.

“In the newspaper every day there will be murder stories about honor killings,” added Ergüven. “Even in the more liberal segments of the society, you are under pressure. When you read about a woman who has been murdered or experienced domestic violence, it doesn’t feel like an [anomaly] — you feel it in your bones. You feel the violence everywhere around you.”

Ergüven portrays this violence contrasted with the ebullience of youth. In many ways, to watch “Mustang” is to experience filmmaking in the present tense. The camera gallivants with the girls, chasing the electric current of their sisterly bond as they communicate without words and test the limits of their newfound sexuality. The cinematography is so kinetic that interruptions to the dreamlike flow, such as instances of violence or threats to the sisters, feel like rude awakenings.

Much of this energy was present in the first draft of the movie. After an arduous and ultimately fruitless five years trying get her first film off the ground, Ergüven was just about to throw in the towel on filmmaking. “My friend and co-writer Alice Winocour was the one who fooled me into writing the script by saying, ‘If you don’t have the script by the end of the summer, you’re going to die.’ It worked so well. I was hammering my keyboard like crazy, working 20 hours a day. The script was written in one breath. There was something very raw about the energy. We daydreamed the characters together.”