Deniz Gamze Ergüven
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Frequently compared to Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides," Ergüven's film does have in common five sisters oppressed by religious beliefs, but "Mustang" is much richer, a feminist portrait of youth in rebellion against an entire country's patriarchal culture.
It's also that judgment which separates "Mustang" from Sofia Coppola's surreal "The Virgin Suicides", which tells a very similar tale of confined female vitality.
Deniz Gamze Ergüven's Mustang transplants The Virgin Suicides to rural Turkey, a place where female-horror fairy tales aren't always fiction.
The premise of “Mustang” may sound familiar—and visually, director and co-writer Deniz Gamze Ergüven does seem to have borrowed a few cues from Sofia Coppola ’s stirring 1999 debut, “ The Virgin Suicides ,” in making her own feature film debut.
Despite its surface similarities, Deniz Gamze Ergüven's feature debut is not a Turkish remake of Sofia Coppola's 1999 film, The Virgin Suicides.
It’s impossible to watch this presentation of blossoming female sexuality without thinking of “The Virgin Suicides,” minus the male-generated perspective Sofia Coppola employed.
There are mordant echoes here of the five Bennet daughters in Pride and Prejudice, whose mother's anxiousness to get them married off is a matter of financial rather than moral urgency.
Cowritten with Alice Winocour, the story suggests a Turkish “Virgin Suicides” with bits of “The Wolfpack” and “Pride and Prejudice” folded in.
Ergüven is quick to point out her mythical sources, including allusions to the Minotaur, the labyrinth and the five-headed Lernaean Hydra, and her avowed cinematic influences run farther afield than merely Sofia Coppola, including Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers,” the men-in-captivity tales of Bresson’s “A Man Escaped” and Don Siegel’s “Escape From Alcatraz,” as well as Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom,” which Ergüven calls “the story of society grappling with fascism through the prism of a sordid tale.”
The theme of youthful isolation has long been a staple of coming-of-age movies, diversely explored in films as different as Catherine Hardwicke’s Thirteen , Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In , Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang and, more recently, Deborah Haywood’s Pin Cushion or Jonah Hill’s Mid90s .
You may liken her film to The Virgin Suicides if you wish—or The Magdalene Sisters, or even Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.