I like women, especially women who love to laugh. Therefore, I very much agree with the phrase "Women who love to laugh are generally not too bad." Sadly, that doesn't apply to the young, beautiful, laughing girls in "Mustang."
This is a beautiful and cruel movie. At the beginning of the film, the sun is dazzling, the sky is blue, the sea breeze is blowing, and a group of boys and girls dressed in white are playing and fighting in the sea. At the moment, the girls are riding on the shoulders of the boys, and they are shoving and screaming at each other to see who will be pushed into the water in the end... With the cheers and laughter one after another, those young bodies and sincere smiles make the Impressed.
This passage is so splendid and joyous that the audience will mistake it for a nice little refreshing movie. However, as Lalei said, "The world is full of changes, and many beautiful things often change in an instant." What happened not only stunned them, but also shocked the jaws of the audience - these girls were sternly reprimanded by their grandma, "How can you stick your private parts against the neck of a strange man!? How can you be ashamed? You don't even have a heart!? Are you going to disgrace your family members!?" Then, as an elder, she pulled the innocent girls into the house one by one and forcibly checked their chastity.
The sudden turn of events left us unprepared. How could such a thing still happen at a time when civilization is making unprecedented progress? Don't these girls live in the same era as us? Faced with all this, the audience, like Laleigh, could only stare with puzzled eyes.
Laleigh is the youngest girl in the film, and the film uses her (Gunes Sensoi) perspective and voice-over to tell the story. Laleigh has four older sisters, who lost their parents at an early age and now live with her grandmother and uncle. On the surface, the girls living in Turkey are no different from girls in other countries. They all love to wear T-shirts and jeans, they all love beauty, fashion, talking, laughing, fighting, and making trouble... But in essence These girls live in the shackles of a seriously backward thinking and extremely closed culture.
"Mustang" is the debut film of Turkish director Deniz Gemze Erguvin, which tells the story of five girls who are imprisoned and oppressed. The name of the movie is called "Wild Horse" because the film praises and respects the innate free spirit of the Mustang. A captive horse, no matter how pure its bloodline, how good its breed, or how arrogant its appearance, is far inferior to any wild horse galloping on the grassland in my opinion. The reason is simple, freedom is priceless!
It is human nature to pursue freedom, and people, societies, systems, and ideologies that deprive and restrict the reasonable freedom of others under any pretext or in any name are cancers, evils, and crimes. Therefore, the more beautiful the girls in the film, the deeper the audience's understanding of their pain.
For home, the hearts of these young girls are surging with huge waves of love and hatred at the same time. It was home that raised them, and now it is home that imprisoned them. In order to prevent the girls from continuing to do any "shameful" things, grandma and uncle invited workers to reinforce and raise the fence, and nailed iron bars all over the windows. The warm and happy home was gone, replaced by a prison.
There is such a scene in the film, which is unforgettable after watching it. Bright and abundant sunlight slanted in through the window and sprinkled on several girls. Those who hate bondage wear only underwear and panties, and they willfully show their long legs and bare feet. The sun at the moment is so warm and yet so far away. At this moment, these girls are in the most gorgeous years of their lives, but their future and destiny are so bleak.
In this picture, beauty and cruelty coexist. They are like goldfish swimming in a glass tank. The future seems bright, but there is no way out. After the "humiliating" incident, the girls were banned from going to school, contacting outsiders, and even going out. Their lives have been filled with the word "being" ever since.
Their youth was brutally castrated by backward and decadent ideas and traditions, and their relatives were the executioners. At the age where they should be gorgeous, there are only two things left in their lives today, that is, learning how to be a qualified housewife and waiting for someone to come to the door.
Outside their youthful carcasses and colorful underwear, they were required to wear ugly traditional robes—the gray-black, uniformly styled women's traditional dress that only exposed their face and hands. There was extreme reluctance and contempt on the faces of the girls who were forced to wear them. La Lei, the youngest but most courageous, stuck out her tongue and said that the clothes were "dirty scum."
In fact, it is not the clothes that the elders force them to wear, but the ideas and cultures that stifle their individuality and deprive them of their freedom—those that disrespect women, disrespect humanity, advocating male power, and extremely backward views on love and concept of marriage. This society regards free love and premarital sex as a scourge, essentially seeing individuality and freedom as scourges. To put it bluntly, this kind of society is anti-human.
Although the picture of the movie is bright, the girls' lives are dark; although the girls' hearts are colorful, their lives are black and white. The more we get to know these girls, the more we hate this system of imprisoning humanity.
In the days that followed, the sisters left the house one after another. Don't be too happy, they just went from one prison to another, that's all. The eldest sister is a little better, married to the boy she likes. The second sister was forced to marry a strange man she never knew.
On the wedding night, the groom tossed and turned on the bed in search of a mysterious thing - the blood of a virgin. Outside the bridal room, the groom's family couldn't wait to urge, "Bring out the sheets and show us!" Inside the bridal room, the groom took the sheets and looked over and over again, but still couldn't find even a trace of blood. He glared at the bride fiercely, those eyes were like volcanoes, as if angry lava would be spewed out at any moment.
Looking at her husband, the scared and frightened bride standing aside raised her right hand, "I swear I am a virgin." However, no one believed her, her husband and family even sent her to the hospital overnight for examination Why didn't she go red on her wedding night! The doctor asked her if she had had sex before, and she said yes, and the doctor asked who, and she replied with a mute face, "The whole world fucked me." It was a heartbreaking and thought-provoking answer.
When the body does not belong to oneself, the freedom does not belong to oneself, and the soul does not belong to oneself, living is no different from death.
If the second sister finally succumbed to reality, then the third sister made a completely different choice - she chose to say goodbye to this dirty world. When the bang finally came, "Mustang" became the Turkish version of "Death of the Virgin."
Sadly, even the decisive suicide of the third sister failed to evoke even the slightest reflection and repentance from her uncle and grandmother. They have turned into guardians of backward thinking and corrupt culture, and they have intensified their efforts to take stricter control and discipline on the unmarried fourth sister and fifth eldest Lalei.
In fact, I have no anger at this uncle who is roaring and yelling "I'm going to kill you" at every turn and the seemingly kind but ignorant grandma, only sad. Although they repeatedly hurt their loved ones, they are also victims of ignorant culture and backward thinking. They have long since lost their ego, let alone their soul. For them, the word freedom is farther away than the Milky Way.
The tragic situation of the girls in the film is shocking, because such a thing is happening in this era, and it is happening around us. "Mustang" caused a huge international sensation as soon as it was released and attracted widespread attention and discussion. In this film, we felt the frankness, courage and responsibility of the filmmakers - the film originated from real life and eventually changed it. This is the value and significance of the film "Mustang".
There is a metaphor we often use in the past, called "runaway horse", which refers to a person or an event out of control and may cause dangerous consequences. What I'm saying now is that if you lose control, you will lose control, and if you cause danger, you will be dangerous, let's spread our hooves and be a wild horse!
This text is given to myself, long live freedom!
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