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Mustang. A Gallop Toward Freedom
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The word Mustang refers to an indomitable horse or mare unable to live locked up. The title is very appropriate when we are talking about five orphaned sisters, aged between 12 and 16, whose vitality and freshness are kidnapped by a sick and dark moral. Starting from the dramatic story that women are living in Muslim society, the new female director Deniz Gamze has created a story that does not victimize the protagonists. She lets them transmit their vivacity and healthy desire for freedom to the audience.
The film begins with a playful image on the Black Sea. The school year ends and the five protagonists, five sisters, play in the water with their fellow students. This nice picture that radiates joy and innocence is seen as immoral and scandalous behaviour by adults. It is also viewed with concern and anger by both their grandmother and the uncle who have the charge of the girls. From here everything changes. The teenagers must be preserved from males and their home becomes a prison. Their duties will be reduced to learning how to be real housewives: sewing, cooking, not slinky dresses and conversations with other families. The five sisters will be given as wives to some husbands they do not even know. The light has given way to the gloom.
With their complicity and joy, the girls can escape from the prison they are subjected to. However, the more rebellious they are, the more bolts and impenetrable walls their captors put. These are symbols of extreme male chauvinism and a false religious conception. The strategies the five sisters use to circumvent this unreason bring a fresh dose of humor without making the story to lose depth.
Deniz Gamze is a Turkish female director based in France. With a simple story and a cast of nonprofessional actresses, Gamze has managed to reflect on the grave contradictions that her country of origin lives nowadays, straddling the East and West, between secularism and religious extremism. The film shows the sad role of rural women in Turkish society with a visual dynamics and a narrative line that gallop toward freedom.
Texts: Núria Farré. facebook@cinemaperaestudiants.cat
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