Mustang (2015)

  I really don't like many coming-of-age films.  I find them irritating and generally non-relatable.  Mustang is less of a coming-of-age, however, than a desperate escape attempt.

Lale (Güneş Sensoy) is the youngest of five sisters in rural Turkey and the main narrator of the film.  She and her sisters only want to have fun on the last day of school but a nosy neighbor tells their grandmother (Nihal G. Koldas) that they were behaving indecently.  Word eventually reaches their very conservative uncle (Ayberk Pekcan), who moves in to the house so he can keep an eye on them. The harder Grandma and Uncle restrict, however, the more rebellious the girls become until there is nothing left to do but marry them off as soon as possible to save the family name.  As Lale sees her sisters disappear one by one, she begins to make plans for one final escape to Istanbul.

Purity policing is gross.  After the neighbor narcs on the girls, their tightly-wound uncle takes them to a doctor to have their hymens checked to ensure that they're still virgins and therefore of value to the family.  If that sounds like some medieval bullshit to you, you clearly haven't heard that in 2019 rapper T.I. faced media backlash after revealing that he also takes his teenaged daughter to the doctor every year for the same reason.  2019.  Because as a society we have not fully accepted that women should have control over their own bodies.

Well, Mustang directly confronts what happens when those policies are enforced on young women, with outcomes ranging from forced unhappy marriage, rebellion and runaways, and suicide.  In that sense, Mustang is an anxiety-inducing nightmare of a film.  But it also shows how smart and resilient these girls are in refusing to comply with this oppression and building lives and little moments for themselves despite the forces arrayed against them.  It's a good movie but it's not an easy movie.

Currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.