Mustang, from Friday May 13, QFT Belfast
MUCH like Sofia Coppola's hit The Virgin Suicides, Mustang focuses on five beautiful young sisters placed under house arrest by uber-religious guardians who seem worryingly preoccupied with preserving the chastity of their charges throughout puberty.
However, while Coppola's film applied the filter of a dreamy, fantasy-tinged male perspective to its 1970s-set storytelling, Turkish film-maker Deniz Gamze Erguven's striking debut feature takes us inside the walls of its sisters' increasingly fortified present day Black Sea village home to sample their claustrophobic oppression first-hand.
At first, Lale (Gunes Sensoy), Nur (Doga Doguslu), Ece (Elit Iscan), Selma (Tugba Sunguroglu) and Sonay (Ilayda Akdogan) put up with the draconian regime instigated by their harried grandmother (Nihal Koldas) and scarily stern uncle Erol (Ayberk Pekcan) with admirably good grace.
However, as granny does her utmost to thrust each girl into hastily arranged marriages, it becomes worryingly clear that there is more to the siblings stifling situation than just conservative religious convention and institutionalised misogyny.
Sweet, funny and shocking in roughly equal measure, Mustang takes its audience on an unexpectedly tense, anger-inducing ride that gradually builds from gentle canter to a desperate life or fate-worse-than-death gallop as teenage wilfulness boils-over into full-scale, outraged rebellion.
:: Mustang is showing at QFT Belfast from Friday May 13, tickets and times at Queensfilmtheatre.com. See next week's Scene for our review.
