Turkish delight
MUSTANG | Director Deniz Gamze Ergüven explains how her Oscarnominated drama came to be sired…
I’m so tired of that comparison!” sighs Turkish director Deniz Gamze Ergüven when Agenda mentions The Virgin Suicides, the 1999 picture to which her striking debut Mustang has oft been likened. To be fair, her film and Sofia Coppola’s have much in common, both being first features by actresses turned writerdirectors that, in addition to having attentiongrabbing premieres at Cannes, tell of sisters locked up by religious relatives. Ergüven, though, prefers to cite Pasolini’s Salò, Bergman’s Summer With Monika and Don Siegel’s Escape From Alcatraz as influences on a film that – when not juxtaposing the untamed sensuality of youth with a patriarchal society’s blinkered intolerance – has its feisty lead character plot a jail-break every bit as ingenious as the one Clint Eastwood pulled off in 1979.
It’s small wonder Mustang has found enthusiastic support around the globe – enough, in fact, to see it nominated for the best foreign film award at this year’s Oscars. ( Son Of Saul wound up pipping it to the prize.) Not too shabby for a film that lost its producer three weeks before shooting, a catastrophe that had ramifications not just for Ergüven but for the unborn child she was carrying at the time. “It was not nice to have that ugliness be my baby’s first sensation,” she admits. “I was literally being betrayed, in a very ugly way. The film was shafted, the crew began to fall apart and everything I had put into place was going up in smoke. But then a few days later, another producer came in and saved my life.”
Ergüven’s language may seem emotive, but it befits a story in which the incarceration of five orphan sisters for the ‘crime’ of playing with boys sees their very lives hang in the balance. Their world, in a remote village some 600km away from Istanbul, is one in which any contact with the opposite sex is oppressively monitored, right down to a woman’s wedding night when her marital bed-sheets are inspected for virginal blood. “A doctor told me about a bride who was taken to hospital because she had not bled,” Ergüven recalls. “With families like that, it’s possible they’ll kill the girl right there and then.”
Happier times await Ergüven herself, who might now be able to make the film about the 1992 LA riots ( Kings) she had initially hoped would be her first feature project. “It was my child for five years and I had a hard time leaving it,” says the 37-year-old. “Even today I feel bruised, like I’ve fallen off a horse. But I have a strong feeling we ‘un-dig’ films, almost like archaeologists. They’re already there with their own lives, and we just pull them out…” NS
ETA | 13 MAY Mustang opens next month.
‘I was literally being betrayed, in an ugly way. The film was shafted’