I’m in love… with Deniz Gamze Ergven’s Mustang. I don’t really want to watch another movie right now. This is enough for me. Shit.
I guess that this feeling will pass (good news for MovieNight, although I could just keep showing this…) but for now, let me share the heartfelt observations of Norris:
Man, that Deniz Egrven knows what she’s doing. I came expecting beauty and Mustang delivered, along with so much more. In fact, I’m now surprised it hasn’t got more love internationally — it’s just such strong filmmaking all around. Yes, it had the Virgin-Suicides-like dreamy visions of imprisoned young femininity, but what great storytelling, and what detailed and compassionate observations of the family, in the type of repressive culture so many films caricaturize. And what kick-ass acting? Especially the older women.
This Northern Turkish culture reminded me of a Southern Italian one I got to knew through a then-girlfriend in summer, 2000, when we spent time in a tiny town outside Naples where both her parents grew up. The people were lovely but just as controlled by the same fear of a household-shaming brutta figura, as the ones in Mustang were. They ran the same brutal clampdown on anything potentially “whorish,” and for reasons that seemed to have as little to do with Catholicism than as the Mustang town’s did with Islam.
Another thing I loved about the film: what a marginal role religion played in that patriarchy. At one point, we hear Uncle Saddam Hussein ask his guests if they drink alcohol, just to be a good host, because they clearly did in his house, whereas in most observant Muslim households that’d be haram, I’m pretty sure. I also loved how the appealing aspects of Turkish traditional life were shown, by having little Lale get won over by making chewing gum and other cool trade secrets from the womenfolk. And how the women’s sweetness made the situation tolerable, and maybe even a desirable alternative.
It’s impossible to know to what degree a female director was better able to modulate the Lolita imagery, making the girls seem sweet, ripe, and robust without objectifying their bodies. I mean, that wet-white-shirted, uniformed-schoolgirl romp in the surf is the stuff of soft-porn and hair-metal videos. But it really was only sort of sexy and mostly beautiful, and also innocent and playful. Plus: either director or DP is genius for finding such a resonant image in the virginity test: that overhead shot of radiant young girl, laid like a homicide victim for ID by the family, the white lower half of her dress illuminated from within.
And Lale. Man. Did she remind you too of the girl narrator in Days of Heaven? I love how her voice takes us through the whole story, right up to that final moment: when she collapses into her teacher’s arms, and this pint-sized force of nature becomes a child in the presence of the sole mother she ever knew, and one clearly needed so desperately and not just for sanctuary from their home. And when the teacher ending it with the final line “Honey” (or whatever it is in Turkish). That pretty much wrecked me.
You can read more of Chris’s published observations and musings on his author’s site, bychrisnorris.com
More about this film on IMDb 
