Advertisement

Movies & TV

>>> MUSTANG

MUSTANG

SP D: Deniz Gamze Ergüven. Turkey/France/Germany. 94 min. Sep 10, 9 pm Ryerson Sep 11, 2:45 pm TIFF Bell Lightbox 2. Rating: NNNN


Five teenaged girls living in a seaside Turkish village are having a little too much fun celebrating the end of the school year. Their punishment? The family patriarch – the uncle who’s raised them since their parents’ death – puts them under house arrest and starts marrying them off.

Ergüven empathetically presents the village women – especially the girls’ grandmother – as more bent on protecting the girls than controlling them, but she’s plainly furious with the entire system. That anger, however, never takes over or messes with the craft. She gets great performances from her cast and creates gorgeous images of the five sisters at play and in repose,

Though programmers compare this to Sophia Coppola’s Virgin Suicides, Ergüven is really taking a page out of Marleen Gorris’s (A Question Of Silence) playbook. She’s made a fiercely feminist statement into a work of art.

Can’t wait to see what she does next.

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.

Recently Posted