Mustang (2015)

I have mixed feelings about this film. On the one hand, i think it is good to use the medium of film to call out the various injustices present around the world, even though i personally don’t really enjoy watching a bunch of girls having a horrible life. On the other hand, the majority of the turkish reviews i’ve seen of this film suggest that the director is out of touch, and the acting and language is terrible.

Regarding the first point: the film is set up as a series of vignettes, each following the last, in which the girls’ lives become more and more controlled. This setup, and the subject, mean that it invites comparison with the virgin suicides. Both feature overbearing guardians thinking they know what’s best for their children, but not actually caring about what their children think, which ultimately leads to them losing their children. Both lean fairly heavily into aesthetic, not necessarily at the expense of narrative, but definitely artificially elevated to a higher position than had the aesthetic spawned kind of naturally from the narrative.

Watching five girls’ uncle and grandmother lock them in a house and set up arranged marriages for them is not fun viewing, but given that it is still a thing that happens in various places around the world, it is in my mind a good thing that people are making films that highlight this. The trouble comes from the fact that it seems that almost every turkish person i’ve seen writing about this particular film say that it’s junk. The reasons given generally fall into two categories: it’s an inaccurate portrayal of arranged marriage; and the acting and writitng is bad.

I will tackle the second category first and say simply: i don’t care. To my mind, one of the best things about watching films in languages i don’t understand and relying on subtitles is that i don’t have to know whether the dialogue sounds normal or not, because that responsibility is passed on to the subtitle writers, and subtitles get more leeway when it comes to tone. So if the way the actors were speaking sounded like how a posh person thirty years ago would talk, so be it; to me they sounded like they were speaking turkish and i don’t speak turkish. The complaints about people from various regions speaking with the wrong accents also obviously didn’t bother me in this case, but also don’t bother me more generally: in british cinema, there are often one or two actors speaking with an accent that is unexpected for the character they are supposed to be playing, and for the most part it doesn’t break the immersion for me. And while it’s frustrating when an american writes the screenplay for a film or tv show set in the uk and no-one checks to see whether the script contains words like “sidewalk”, “candy”, or “pants”, i am perfectly capable of overlooking that if the plot is compelling.

All this is to say, the quality of the acting in, and the script of mustang did not negatively affect my viewing experience and, without wanting to put words into the turkish viewers’ mouths, i think they might not have affected the turkish viewers’ experience much either, if it wasn’t for the problematic plot, which drew so much ire that everyone started attacking other aspects as well.

The main complaint with regards to the plot is not that the film is making up the concern about arranged marriage in turkey, but rather that it oversimplifies and caricatures the issue to such an extent that it watches more like dark comedy than legitimate critique. The identity of the director as the child of a diplomat who spent most of their life living in france, combined with the accent concerns (in which the residents of a rural village all instead have an istanbul accent) result in a film that seems designed to win international awards rather than be well-received in the country or region it represents.

And things like this did leak through during the viewing. There is scene where one of the girls is having a virginity test, and the doctor is open-minded enough to say that he would not tell the family even if the girl isn’t a virgin. I’m not sure that in such a situation the demands that a young girl undergo a virginity test wouldn’t be escalated. The scene where one of the girls decides to have sex with a stranger in her uncle’s car while he’s gone for ten minutes or so also doesn’t seem rooted in reality. The casual nature of the head coverings. As i say, i’m not turkish, so i can’t comment on whether these are realistic situations are not, but some of these more dramatic vignettes, in combination with sloppy background details, took away from the film.

Where the film did shine for me was in the smaller acts of rebellion and scenes of the girls trying to normalise their imprisonment. Cutting their hair and ripping their clothes, spitting in the coffee they are required to serve to suitors’ parents. Trying to tan in the window, or creating a swimming pool out of blankets. The camerawork and colours were all beautiful, and together with these scenes created a mood of beautiful hopelessness. From a story perspective, i don’t think the film benefited from the big drama, and according to the turkish viewers, the exaggeration was insulting and offensive.

I don’t think it was a bad film, i quite enjoyed it; but then again, it’s not my culture being misrepresented on the global stage by someone with the weakest of links to that culture.