mustang and the mountaintop
When my sister arrived to babysit Saturday night, I told her that AK, Andrew and I were going to see a movie I described “kind of like a Bosnian Virgin Suicides , I think.” I came up with that tactful description based on the trailer for Mustang —because I’d seen some white-looking Muslims and bored-looking teenage girls trapped at home. The movie is Turkish—in fact a completely different country than Bosnia!—but there are some Virgin Suicides parallels. No suicides for these sisters. Sonay, Selma, Ece, Nur and Lale are a pack of sisters ranging in age from about ten to seventeen. They all have long, untamed brown hair, and they spend their days wandering the fields and beaches of their small town. Lale, the narrator and the youngest of the girls, tells us that it all changed in the blink of an eye, on a day when they play a game of chicken with some schoolboys in the surf and steal apples from a farmer who threatens them with a shotgun. When they get home, they’re in troubl...