Just announced as an Oscar nominee for best foreign language film, Mustang hails from France and tells the arresting tale of five sisters in a small Turkish village.
Informed by first time director Deniz Gamze Ergüven‘s personal life, and perhaps Sofia Coppola‘s The Virgin Suicides (it’s certainly been compared to the film enough times), Mustang is a gripping and thoroughly engaging story.
Told through the eyes of five sisters, with the primary storyteller being Lale (a completely wonderful Güneş Şensoy), the story opens to what seems like a group of young girls having some innocent fun after school. In the eyes of their ultra conservative neighbors, though, that fun isn’t so innocent. This incident leads their grandmother and uncle, who are raising them, to increasingly restrict the girls’ world, sheltering them until they can be taught, trained, matched, and married off.
Steadily, Lale sees her own possible future reflected in the various fates of her sisters and decides that she needs to do something quickly if she wants to have any hand in determining her own destiny.
Despite a few cultural barriers, it’s easy to empathize with the charismatic girls as their lives become less and less their own and more claustrophobic with each frustrating moment that passes. With emotions that are utterly universal, it’s easy to forget that the words being spoken are not in fact English. Not to say that the story lacks complexity, but it is easy to follow and understand, riding on the strength of some very talented and expressive young women.
The narrative is fairly straightforward, though it jumps from one slice of the girls’ life to another as time progresses. Despite having more of an overall arc than a plot per se, it is never dull and fairly spellbinding in fact as we anxiously wonder what is going to become of Lale and her sisters as they attempt navigate a journey to womanhood while being steered by those who would rather they never leave the harbor rather than risk catching a bad wind or capsizing.
I would have liked a few things to be clearer at times, but I can probably chalk that up to over simplified subtitles and a lack of understanding of Turkish customs, as well as fairly large cast of characters with unfamiliar names. It’s a memorable and poignantly bittersweet movie with notes that hit all the highs and all the lows at all the right times, bringing both unexpected joys and devastating blows.
Mrs. Hamster says:
“I really liked it and it’s no wonder it got nominated.”
My rating: Four out of five hats
Trailer:
Mustang is in select theaters and breaks free in the DC area January 15
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