Summer in a Turkish village. Aged 12 to 16, Sonay, Selma, Ece, Nur and Lale have been raised by a strict mother. When a neighbor sees them at the beach playing with boys from school, a scandal erupts and the five sisters find themselves locked up and supervised “for their own good”. To force them to become respectable women, their family starts looking for husbands for them. But it will take more than that to smother the girls’ desire for freedom…

Picture gallery

Favored since it was shown at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 2015, praised by a dithyrambic press and labeled a hit with the public, Mustang by Deniz Gamze Ergüven is armed to be a true piece of deception. Which it is not by half: without being a real shock or sensational revelation, this charming, imperfect and important debut is carried by its good qualities, especially a script that is sometimes striking and a sensitivity that is enticing. Which doesn’t stop this fable, after a gripping first part, from descending into classic auteur cinema thanks to a plot and a rhythm that are both less and less convincing. It starts to look like a watered-down version of the excellent Virigin Suicides (the only common thread is the five sisters muzzled by conventions) and lets one hope that Deniz Gamze Ergüven takes the inverse path of Sofia Coppola, by getting better from one movie to the next.