Mustang (2015) Dir. Deniz Gamze Erguven

So I've been M.I.A. for 4 months. I've been watching some female-directed films, I assure you, but restricting myself to that and finding the time to write about them proved a little daunting as we moved into the holiday season and awards season. I struggled to keep up, and I intimidated myself in a big way, so I abandoned the blogging aspect of the project for a while.

I'm working, slowly, to get back on track and to start posting semi-regularly. I've committed myself to the #52FilmsByWomen project, which should provide some structure and hold me more accountable. I've committed to watching a very manageable 52 films by women in 2016, a goal I intend to surpass. I hope to do a reasonably good job of blogging about most of them from this point forward.

So far in 2016, I've watched 5 films directed by women. Sleeping with Other People , Girlhood, What Happened, Miss Simone?, Appropriate Behavior (a joy of a movie I still hope to blog about), and, last night, Mustang. Check out my review of Mustang below, and I'll try to have more for you next week.

XOXO- Adam

As a movie lover living in Chicago, horses seemingly serve two purposes:

 

              1) Carriage rides down Michigan Avenue for terrible people with disposable income

2     2)Tested, timeless, and apt metaphors for the dichotomous tension of domestication/freedom. Or that reoccurring proverbial question of “can and should wild horses be ‘tamed?’”

 

Mustang is, in part, about the latter purpose. Not that there’s a single horse in the film—the title itself is enough to conjure that rich intertextual imagery. Well, the title, and the film’s brilliant direction and visual storytelling.

 

There’s a certain oppositional, binary cinematography throughout the whole film that captures this divide between “wild mare” and “tamed pony.”  So much of the film views majestic, open, and liberating.  The five young sisters at the center of the movie move boldly through broad landscapes of desire, youth, and possibility, as if galloping unsaddled across the American frontier. At first, this dreamy unrestrictedness perseveres through the girls increasing confinement and oppression, communicating the freedom they desire and the rebellious fun they demand. As the stakes grow higher, the landscape narrows and the levity disappears. The lens cages us, restrains us, ties us up in the barn as we buck and kick and scream to breakaway.

 

The mustangs, as lone horses running free, also become more apparent over time as members of their herd are captured or picked off. At the onset of the film, the five sisters are seemingly a singular organism, nearly indistinguishable from one another and operating with a pack mentality, acting as and for the benefit of their sisterhood. The importance of their sisterhood remains at the center of the film and at the center of the lives, but we start to see them articulate individual desires and move as individual agents. Their loneness manifests most saliently out of necessity as the oldest sisters are forced into marriages, out of the sisterherd, and the remaining girls are left under the alarmingly tightening control of their uncle and overpowered grandmother. The girls struggle with the realization that to continue living in the freedom and openness of their childhood, they may have to brave the frontier alone. But the film’s central heroine, Lale, is up for the challenge, if only because she has to be to survive.

 

Stepping away from the horse metaphors for now, I want to say how beautiful, breathless, moving, and empowering this movie is. Like all great movies, it took me to another place and helped me know where I am (and want to be) so much better. And it was truly a lovely and touching journey to that place.

 

The film appropriately utilizes quiet feminism in protest to the films many quiet moments of repression, then large, dramatic cacophonies of empowerment as the oppressive shit really starts to hit the fan. The sisters live in a world where they had an implicit freedom as pre-pubescent bodies that afforded them opportunities for self-expression, norm violation, and above all, fun. But once their breasts develop, all the freedom is seemingly stripped from them as they’re molded into docile and desireless wives and forced into marriages. The girls rebel against rules and authority figures that would rob their autonomy, erase their childhoods, and deny their sexuality, but without going so far as to scream “fuck the patriarchy!” Mostly, initially, the girls hold on to their right to have fun—to just be young girls—and in doing so, fun becomes a political, feminist act. Sneaking away for a dalliance on the beach with a boy or to watch a soccer game, cracking jokes and expressing joy despite being told women aren’t supposed to laugh or have a sense of humor, playing dress up in an older sister’s underwear despite being required to wear muted, shapeless dresses—these moments of “the youth being young” become weapons, chinking the armor of their uncle’s and their society’s patriarchal authority.

In the interest of not playing too fast and loose with spoilers, I’ll simply state that the stakes become much higher and the need for radical action grows imminent. The girls become obsessed with escape from their small town, their controlling uncle, their world’s oppressive gender politics, and a conservative morality that demands their acquiescence of autonomy over their bodies and their selves. The third act functions effectively as a taut prison break thriller full of both delicious ironies and genuine edge-of-your-seatness. If the tools of their liberation and the nature of their confinement seem too dramatic on paper, the director maintains a tone of plausability while reminding us in this world, where resources and outlets for these girls seem so few, likely their only avenues to freedom are the dramatic ones.

 

And the resolution, while perhaps too romantic and wish-fulfilling for some, inspires a dreamy but necessary hope that there is a place out there for young women who fight the constrictive structures that would saddle and detain them. It is unfortunate that this place is always “elsewhere,”—New York for the early 20^th century immigrant, San Francisco for the 1970s homo-- romantic but also somewhat sincere meccas of possibility for people who can’t or won’t survive in their status quo. At least those places exist, even if they’re not often the salvation we’ve dreamt them to be, even if we deserve to live in a world where that salvation can be found anywhere.

 

Go see this movie. It’s a true gem. Even with all of its moments of darkness and implicit political imprisonment, there is a beautiful levity and sense of unity throughout the film. Much of the first two acts are merely slices of life of childhood and sisterhood, beautifully captured and performed, full of humor and innocent desire and gorgeous friendship and solidarity. It’s a movie full of feelings, a lot of them joyous ones, that asks us to hold on to joy at all costs against all forces. A subversive movie that empowers young women, young women living in more plainly restrictive societies than our own (rural Turkey—don’t think I’ve said that yet), that they have the right to choose the things that make them happy and make them who they are.

P.S. Message me if you’ve seen the movie because I would love to talk with someone about the grandmother in this movie. I think she might be the most interesting character with her torn beliefs and allegiances and the subtle ways even she finds to access power.