'Mustang': Lovely sisters, brutal truths

The landscapes of northern Turkey, the sun hitting the hills close by the Black Sea, are lovely in Deniz Gamze Ergüven's debut feature, Mustang.

The five sisters at the center of this powerful film - nominated yesterday for a best foreign language Oscar - are lovely, too, full of spirit and joy as they bid goodbye to their teachers and embark on what they expect will be a leisurely summer vacation.

There is nothing lovely, however, about the story Mustang tells: of a culture where women are at once oppressed and sexualized, where strict religious tenets and an entrenched patriarchy combine to keep women in subservient roles.

Making their way home after the final day of school, sisters (from youngest to oldest) Lale (Günes Sensoy), Nur (Doga Zeynep Doguslu), Ece (Elit Iscan), Selma (Tugba Sunguroglu), and Sonay (Ilayda Akdogan) stop to frolic in the surf, playing a game where they straddle the shoulders of some boys. A neighbor witnesses the sisters as they laugh and splash around and reports them to their family. To the passerby, the girls' behavior is lewd, illicit.

When the girls arrive home, they are greeted with fierce admonishments from their grandmother and their uncle (the sisters are orphans). Like the wild horses that give Ergüven's film its title, the sisters rear up and rebel, but the gossip spreads, the punishments become more severe. Before long, the uncle has put bars on all the windows, locked the doors, and forbidden them to leave. The grandmother brings suitors to the house, determined to marry the older girls off as soon as possible.

Mustang has a fairy-tale quality about it, like a Grimms story in which the young heroine (Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood) must face witches or wolves, the cruel vagaries of life and threats of death, before she can realize her destiny. But Ergüven's film, beautifully shot and beautifully performed, cuts its storybook tone with starker, more brutal truths. Anger - aimed at a conservative social order and those complicit in maintaining it - courses through this sad, striking tale.

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Directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven. With Günes Sensoy, Doga Zeynep Doguslu, Elit Iscan, Tugba Sunguroglu, Ilayda Akdogan. In Turkish with subtitles. Distributed by Cohen Media.

Running time: 1 hour, 37 mins.
Parent's guide: PG-13 (adult themes).
Playing at: Ritz Five.