Five girls want to live life the way they want by having fun instead of being prisoned in a house obeying rules. They live in a neighborhood where the people don’t like their behavior. Two of them, Selma and Sonay are forced to get married. Sonay already has a man in her life and makes a deal to marry him instead of a complete stranger. The other is unhappy with her marriage. Another one of the girls, Ece kills herself and the last two run away. It is Nur's turn to get married, but Lale sneaks both her and Nur escape out of the house. They take a bus and head to Istanbul. Lale really likes her former female teacher, who lives there and thinks of her as the mother she never had.
Blaine: These girls have so much to live for and yet they feel like they’re trapped and it’s unfair that the adults are doing this to them. The girls go after one of the neighbors to yell at her face after she ratted them out just for having fun with some boys and I can’t blame them for yelling at her. I get a little angry because of all that from the girls not being allowed to have fun, being prisoned in the house and to being ratted out by neighbors.
Deniz Gamze Erguven started writing scripts before she could find work in directing. She spent 3 years writing her first script and then she began developing the script for “Mustang”. Deniz had written parts of the script herself and then Alice Winocour became her co-writter. Deniz wanted to show what life was like for a woman in Turkey. Deniz said these five female characters said things that she had never managed to say herself. Their strategy of survival is to be very polite, to not get in trouble and try to please the people around them, but these girls in the film do the opposite. Some of the stuff in “Mustang” is based off of things Deniz has lived or seen in her life. At the beginning of “Mustang”, it shows the girls having fun with boys at the beach and climbing on their shoulders. It was something that Deniz did when she was a teenager and when she got busted she didn’t argue about it like the girls do in the film. She just hung her head in shame. Deniz wanted her characters to be heroines. After directing 2 short films, Deniz decided to make “Mustang” because she had an urge for directing a full length feature. Deniz and the casting director spent nine months trying to find the right girls for these parts.
Elit Iscan had some acting experience and this director she had worked with on a previous film recommended that she meet his good friend, Deniz. He knew that Deniz was looking for 5 young girls and he felt Elit was suitable for the project. Elit met with Deniz and she thought Deniz was a wonderful person. They had a long conversation about “Mustang” and Elit didn’t have to audition at all because Deniz knew she was perfect after that conversation. The script was still in works when Deniz met Elit and she had her in mind a lot as she was writing it. She wrote the part of Ece for Elit. Deniz was scared that Elit would outgrow her character before they could shoot the movie.
Deniz was at an airport and this girl, Tugba Sunguroglu, would pass through her a few times. Deniz really liked her personality, so she went over to Tugba and asked her if she would be interested in being in this movie she was going to make called “Mustang”. Tugba didn’t know what to think because she had never been offered an acting job before and she had no experience in acting. She looked up Deniz online after they met to see what she has done in the past. Tugba felt that Deniz was trust worthy, so she called up Deniz and told her she was in. Deniz tested Tugba out with a lot of screen tests. Tugba was shy when they started shooting “Mustang”, but she got use to it as time went by. The other three girls, Gunes Sensoy, Doga Doguslu and IIayda Akdogan, Deniz met through casting. All five girls felt safe as they were shooting “Mustang” because Deniz was in charge and she made them feel comfortable and supported them. Deniz bonded with these girls and was like their big sister.
A lot of scenes in movies are shot in a different order, but “Mustang” was shot in a straight order starting off with the beginning and wrapping it with the end. Denis cried when three of the girls had to leave because two of the characters in the movie got married and the other killed herself, so they were no longer needed. Deniz’s crying made the girls cry. Deniz missed having IIayda Akdogan, Doga Doguslu and Tugba Sunguroglu around, but she still had Elit Iscan and Gunes Sensoy. Deniz was pregnant while they were shooting the film, but she had enough energy to work 12 hours a day. After “Mustang” wrapped, Elit Iscan felt like she could do anything with herself after working with Deniz and felt that she could achieve a career in acting.
The scene I like the most in “Mustang" is when the girls sneak out the house to go to a trabzonspor (soccer) game and the grandmother sees them on tv and has to take out all the power in the house and the whole village so that their uncle Erol won’t see it on the tv and make sure no one else can tell him. What I liked about that scene is seeing the girls having fun in that crowd. Not all the adults in this movie are bad. There’s Yasin, the truck driver who helps the girls catch the bus they missed to the trabzonspor game. He also teaches Lale how to drive and helps her and Nur get to the bus station. And then there’s Lale’s school teacher who takes those two in after they run away. I feel sorry for Selma being forced into marriage because it’s really something she really doesn’t want judging by the depressed look on her face. I’m happy that at the end Lale and Nur escape and runaway because they’ve had enough and can’t let the adults do this to them any longer.
