High spirits

Any parent with a gaggle of girls knows it’s not easy to repress the energy, spirit, and desires of daughters blossoming into womanhood—however much the anxious parent might want to shield her children from a dark, perverse world.

That’s what the grandmother and uncle of five beautiful, fast-budding sisters try to do in the Turkish coming-of-age drama Mustang, set in a rural coastal village in modern-day Turkey. It all begins when the five orphaned sisters—Sonay (Ilyada Akdogan), Selma (Tugba Sunguroglu), Ece (Elit Iscan), Nur (Doga Zeynep Doguslu), and Lale (Günes Sensoy)—frolic at the beach with a group of male schoolmates, buoyant with carefree laughter and fun. They plunge into the Black Sea in their plaid skirts, and there engage in a juvenile game of chicken fight.

Long, flowing hair is a conspicuous visual theme in Mustang: All the other modest women in the film pin up their hair and cover it with a headscarf, but not these young girls, whose loose, wild tresses flip and flounce, defining their feminine youth.

Their tangled hair is still damp when the sisters reach home, where their grandmother (Nihal G. Koldas) greets them with a black face. A scandalized neighbor had witnessed the scene at the beach and had spread word of the girls’ obscenity—or “rubbing your parts on boys’ necks!” as the grandmother screeches, dragging them one by one behind locked doors for discipline. Confused, the girls protest their innocence, most of them still too young and naïve to understand the power and charm of their blooming sexuality.

An irate Uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekcan) then marches the sisters off to the doctor for virginity tests. They all pass, but no matter—from then on, the guardians resolve to safeguard their chastity until marriage and remove anything that’s likely to “pervert” them: makeup, computers, telephones, glitter-studded shorts, clingy tank tops, even postcards of military men.

Soon, narrates Lale, “the house became a wife factory that we never came out of.” The neighborhood aunties pop in daily to teach the girls how to wrap dolmas, stuff blankets, and do all the other housewifely duties each sister is destined to perform for her future husband and in-laws. Comatose with boredom, the girls come up with ways to rebel—ultimately resulting in steel bars on windows and doors and spikes on walls.

What’s most interesting about Mustang is the different way in which each sister responds to her confinement: One embraces her sensuality with conscious, beguiling ease, pushing the boundaries of virginity with her secret boyfriend (the film gets its PG-13 rating for “mature thematic material, sexual content, and a rude gesture”), while another resigns to her fate with little effort at hiding her discontent. Yet another sister decorously serves coffee and cookies to her future in-laws, but binges on other things (food, danger, boys) in private.

Meanwhile, as young Lale watches her sisters led off one by one in white dresses and red veils, her defiance swells and her mind whirs with schemes. Each child, facing the same circumstance, preserves her unique personality and desires, even if she hasn’t yet figured out all of those desires. What these sisters do know is that they want some space to grow, instead of being funneled into arranged marriages.

Mustang is a film tinged with Western political and cultural overtones. Seen through the perspective of a prepubescent girl, the conclusion—if there is one—seems half-baked and immature. The themes of patriarchal oppression and sexual repression at times seem hackneyed and simplistic. But the film does present a worthwhile question: How can a young, modern woman reconcile the seeming conflict between social modesty and individual empowerment?