Mustang

MUSTANG                A-                   

Turkey  France  Germany  Qatar  (94 mi)  2015  ‘Scope  d:  Deniz Gamze Ergüven

Everything changed in the blink of an eye.  First there was comfort, and then suddenly everything turned to shit.

—Lale (Güneş Nezihe Şensoy)

For film festivals other than Sundance, the stories and slotted in-competition directors appear to be dominantly male-oriented—at Cannes, 16 competition films by men and only 2 by women, and at the Chicago Film Festival, there are 13 male competition films to only 3 by women—making it a rare occurrence when viewers come upon a film written and directed by women, where within the overall history of cinema this still remains relatively unexplored territory.  Winner of the Europa Cinemas prize at Cannes for best European film in the Directors’ Fortnight, this film immediately stands out by conscientiously altering the viewing patterns among the largely male-dominated efforts of contemporary cinema, turning the tables and focusing on the treatment of women, particularly younger adolescent girls who live under extremely repressive social conditions.  Co-written (with Alice Winocour, the 2012 director of Augustine) and directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven, she was born in Ankara, Turkey while studying literature and African history in Johannesburg, South Africa, eventually learning to direct at La Fémis in Paris, where her first feature film is France’s submission to the Academy Award Foreign Film category.  Set in a small Turkish village by the Black Sea, hundreds of miles away from the more populous city of Istanbul, the film opens innocently enough after the last day of school, where instead of riding the bus, 12-year old Lale and her four older sisters Nur (Doğa Zeynep Doğuşlu), Ece (Elit Işcan), Selma (Tuğba Sunguroğlu), and Sonay (Ilayda Akdoğan) decide to walk home instead, as it’s a beautiful sunny day, where they decide to play in the shallow water with some boys in their class, mostly splashing around, but also playing a game where girls sit on the shoulders of boys and try to knock the other sister into the water.  By the time they get home, however, one by one they are beaten by their grandmother (Nihal G. Koldaş), proclaiming their behavior immoral and scandalous, as the girls are the subject of malicious gossip spread around town by their neighbor who claims she saw them “pleasuring themselves” on the necks of the boys.  As their parents died a decade earlier, the grandmother has been raising them, but in this instance their domineering uncle takes over, Erol, Ayberk Pekcan, the driver from Winter Sleep (Kis uykusu) (2014), sending the oldest girls for a virginity test while removing their computers and phones, forcing all girls to wear plain brown dresses while placing iron bars on the windows locking them all indoors in order to “protect” them. 

Essentially believing they have to save the girls from themselves, the film isn’t a comment against Islam, which is the primary religion in Turkey, but against a patriarchal society where men, especially those coming from a poorer educational background, expect women to protect their purity and remain virgins until marriage, believing otherwise their marital chances will be ruined, along with the honor and reputation of the family.  Narrated by the youngest sister Lale, who offers a kind of outspoken Linda Manz sensibility from DAYS OF HEAVEN (1978), the closeness of the girls is evident throughout, as the film pits the expectations of the girls against that of their family, who immediately go about the business of indoctrinating the girls how to be loyal and subservient wives, turning the home into a “wife factory.”  Informed that their school education is over, older women are brought in to teach them how to cook traditional dishes and sew clothes while the uncle goes about the business of arranging marriages for the oldest two sisters, including a stream of inspections from potential suitors, where the goal is to have all the girls, ages ranging from 12 to 16, to be married off by the end of summer.  While the title is a reference to the wild horses indigenous to the area, the symbolism of taming the wildness out of the horses is not lost on the viewers, as much of the film plays out as a clever battle of wills, where an unbridled, free spiritedness is pitted against an entrenched conservatism that condemns their behavior.  This is as much a battle of the West versus the East, where the ideals of freedom and democracy conflict with the more authoritarian, patriarchal governments of the Middle East that are more inclined to impose a strict order upon a society rather than leave them to their own inclinations, where the rights of women have traditionally been stifled for centuries.  Nonetheless, the grandmother is equally conflicted, as she loves the girls, even indulges them from time to time, and in the most hilarious scene of the film is willing to go to outrageous methods to protect them from the wrath of the men after they sneak off to see a local soccer game and can be seen on television cheering them on, literally cutting off the power of the entire village to avoid detection, yet she is also fully complicit in their subjugation.   

The timing of the film uncannily follows in the aftermath of the horrific murder of Özgecan Aslan, a young Turkish university student that was brutally murdered during an attempted rape, her body burned beyond recognition and her hands cut off to avoid detection, an event that sparked outrage across the country leading to massive protests demonstrating against unacceptable violence to women, the first mass movement in support of Turkish women, where Aslan’s father was quoted after her death, “We grew up with fairy tales.  Once upon a time… Once upon a time there was an Özge.  And then there wasn’t any.”  The film is interestingly presented like a fable with Lale’s innocence and fierce independence at its center, with a focus on faces and bodies, often intermingled together, heightening the tension between freedom and repression.  Bathed in the radiant pastel-colored cinematography of David Chizallet and Ersin Gok which beautifully captures the carefree innocence of the young girls, but also how freely they move their bodies as an extension of their inner spirit, the performances have a wonderfully naturalistic feel, where the sisters are often framed in close proximity to one another, almost as if they are an extension of one body and one soul.  What’s so effective about the film is how each of the young girls is portrayed, smart, overly clever, and mischievous, with healthy desires and a burgeoning curiosity, perhaps overly Westernized, but from the outset that’s the way they’ve been taught.  Adding to an interior psychological context is moody, introspective music by Warren Ellis, some of which can be heard here:  Robes De Couleur Merde in Mustang (Warren Ellis), including several with Nick Cave, the duo that masterminded the glorious soundtrack of THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (2007).  The haunting music suggests an element of fragility, a contrast to the defiance and open rebellion they feel in response to their tyrannical treatment.  One by one, as each sister is delivered to the groom’s family like custom bought merchandise delivered to order, the results are mixed, as only the oldest is married to the boyfriend of choice, while all the others are forced to resist in their own ways, often with staggering consequences.  While the youngest is the most independent and outspoken, she is literally the anchor of the film, where the film is largely seen through her eyes, with a narrative slowly evolving from lighthearted comedy to tragedy, where much of this plays out in the realm of horror, though to the director’s credit, even the most tragic sequences are delicately handled.  Ostensibly about the mistreatment of women around the world, and in particular, by overcontrolling men — who deserve to have their heads examined — this is actually one of the better films seen that expresses this universal travesty in such a lyrically poetic manner.  While there is a window of hopeful optimism, the film offers a beautifully observant exposé on childhood ending all too soon, where an idyllic innocence hits a brick wall of male-enforced societal rigidity that becomes fixated on adolescent women, all but imprisoning them for the rest of their lives. 

Augustine

AUGUSTINE         B              

France  (101 mi)  2012  d:  Alice Winocour

Another strangely unsettling Victorian era mood piece, recalling Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011), where more is reflected in tone, unspoken thoughts, and atmospheric visualization than actually providing details or understandable information, written by the first time feature director, where she pulls a story from real life historical events, what little is known, and then reimagines how it might have all played out, finding feminist sentiments within her fictionalized storyline, while keeping her characters completely within their straightjacketed historical times.  What starts out as an 1890’s dissection of class divisions ends up as a bizarre study of sexual dominance.  The key choice here is the brilliant casting of Soko (singer) (aka Stéphanie Sokolinski), a popular singer in France playing the stricken patient Augustine, an illiterate housemaid serving a wealthy aristocratic family, who suffers an epileptic seizure that causes panic at an evening dinner party, where one of the female hosts rather indelicately throws a pitcher of water in her face.  Partially paralyzed afterwards and something of an embarrassment, she’s immediately shuffled off to Salpêtrière Hospital, a sanitarium where the all-male physician staff treats exclusively female patients, where there were as many as 3000 female patients under the care of the chief resident, Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon), where he worked and taught for 33 years, drawing students from all over Europe to learn from him.  His neurological studies predate the field of psychiatry, where the distress suffered by these women was commonly called hysteria, which amounted to seizures and violent sexual fits, both mental and physical disorders that he believed to be an organic condition brought on by trauma, where in the 16th century these women would have been condemned as witches.  To the casual observer, most of the patients were more likely suffering mental disorders, where the hospital was a giant storage grounds housing afflicted women.

When Augustine suffers another seizure on the grounds, she catches the eye of Charcot, not really her medical affliction, but her irrepressible beauty, where in his mind she can become his prized patient arousing interest within the medical profession, as currently the financial operations has a hard time providing enough meat for all the patients.  From the start, an ethically and emotionally complicated relationship develops between doctor and patient, where like a dog and pony show, Charcot shows off Augustine as his cash cow, literally staging her in front of other physicians allowing them to examine her in a state of undress, poking and prodding her like a medical specimen, reminiscent of Abdellatif Kechiche’s Black Venus (Vénus noire) (2010), another historical film obsessed with the naked female anatomy, where sex in the scientific community is never spoken or admitted to, but everything is explained and justified in detailed scientific vernacular.  “You use big words to say simple things,” Augustine tells him, responding to the routine of undressing in front of Charcot, an act of debased brutality and horror if he’s not there, taking a certain pleasure in pleasing him when he is.  Everything has a sexual context for her, though it’s all expressed silently in facial expressions and body movements, as she rarely utters a word.  What we don’t realize initially, of course, is the underlying sexual subtext for the treating doctor, who goes about his business in a thoroughly detached examination process where everything is expressed clinically, all an act to cover up his inner sexual tensions, as he’s more than a little obsessed by this remarkable young woman. The film ignores addressing the medical question of male hysteria while allowing it to dominate the physician’s thoughts throughout, becoming a power play of restraint and social manners, where sex is an unseen force overwhelming everyone’s controlled and orderly lives, where in the picture of restraint, Augustine and Charcot take endless walks in a suffocating fog.

Chiara Mastroianni plays Charcot’s independently wealthy wife, a woman of influence, and certainly capable of seeing through him, though she maintains a respectable distance, never interfering in his profession.  It’s her connections initially that lure highly influential physicians to visit Charcot’s medical exhibitions, which play out as pure theater before a leering male audience, inducing Augustine into a submissive state through hypnosis, resembling an exorcism, as she is quickly inhabited by her fit of hysteria, expressing sexual gyrations through fiercely uncontrolled bodily movements, where her physical contortions resemble the paranormal visits to Barbara Hershey in The Entity (1982).  Charcot hopes to release the disease’s hold over the patient’s otherwise unexplained partial paralysis by simulating the condition, hoping she will simply snap out of it.  The presentation is a bit grotesque, a room filled with men holding invincible, seemingly God-like power over this defenseless woman, yet the men burst into sudden applause afterwords, obviously very pleased with themselves and lauding Charcot’s medical advancement, which produces little more than mere hope, as the paralysis remains.  Interestingly, over time, Augustine’s condition improves on its own, each time after a highly traumatic event, actually producing the effect the doctor was hoping for, but without a prestigious audience around to see it.  Charcot’s ethics are compromised when he sees signs of improvement, but chooses to ignore them during the most important event in his life, where he’s gathered the most influential team of academics and physicians in France. His career on the line and the funding of his neurology program at the hospital at stake, personal ambition takes precedence over everything else.  While all eyes are on him as well, the sleight of hand theatrical nature of hypnotically induced sexual hysteria has the power to persuade men’s souls.  Though she’s been an uneducated, culturally repressed, lower class woman, never given the time of day, Augustine is suddenly jettisoned into the spotlight, where these exhibitions have conditioned her to understand the power she holds over men, for the first time taking control over her own sexuality.  While the music is by Jocelyn Pook, who also scored Stanley Kubrick’s final film EYES WIDE SHUT (1999), the extraordinary finale is a building crescendo, set to the extravagantly transcendent music of Arvo Pärt’s “Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten ARVO PÄRT - Cantus in memory of... (4:59), which in this film is nothing less than a liberating walk to freedom.