The sheer energy that bursts from the screen as the five girls in Mustang play and rebel is the film's greatest strength. It's a story about five Turkish girls in a small village, orphaned sisters raised by their grandmother and an uncle, whose joie de vivre gets them into trouble when a busybody neighbor sees them playing with some male schoolmates, celebrating the arrival of the end of term, and interprets their horseplay as shamefully erotic. The girls are swiftly imprisoned in their home, which becomes a "school for wives," as the youngest girl, Lale (Günes Sensoy), puts it in her occasional voiceover commentary. Eventually, two of the girls are married off, one commits suicide, and two escape to Istanbul, which evokes for them what Moscow did for the sisters in Chekhov's play. The casting is the chief marvel of the film -- none of the girls is a professional actress and they aren't really siblings -- and director and co-writer Deniz Gamze Ergüven makes the most of it. She's less successful at handling the more sensational elements of the plot, the molestation of some of the girls and the suicide, which are treated a little too obliquely. The film was not received well in the Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but since it was co-produced by France, Germany, and Turkey, it was eligible to be submitted as the French contender for the Oscar, and earned a nomination.
