“Mustang” is one of those rare films that liberally displays its political message front and center but in a way that is easily digestible and never obnoxious.

The directorial debut of Turkish-French filmmaker Deniz Gamze Erguven, the film follows the struggles faced by five orphaned sisters, Lale, Nur, Ece, Selma and Sonay, who grow up in a conservative, patriarchal Turkish community. After they are caught horse playing in the ocean with a group of boys, their grandmother and uncle Erol scold them severely for behaving provocatively.

Word quickly spreads around the village that the sisters are harlots. In order to keep the girls chaste and to uphold their image in the public eye, the sisters’ grandmother and uncle bar the windows of their house and keep the doors tightly locked, preventing the girls from leaving, even for school or to socialize with friends. Their grandmother begins to grill into them the values of traditional womanhood, teaching them to cook and sew and behave properly, much to the sisters’ dismay, as they would much rather shirk the constructs of their conservative village and watch soccer matches or blow kisses at boys.

“Mustang” is equally successful at accomplishing its scathing critique on modern-day Turkey’s treatment of women while also capturing the more universal challenges of growing up. In this society, young girls have their husbands chosen for them and are married at alarmingly young ages. Girls who are not virgins on their wedding night are promptly rejected and shunned by their communities.

Erguven deftly mixes the humor that often accompanies puberty and the exploration of one’s sexuality with the larger reality of a patriarchal society that seeks to oppress women and preserve their modesty and virginity for their future husbands.

Although it is primarily a joyous film about teenage rebellion and the bond of sisterhood, the film deals honestly with issues of sex, abuse and oppression in ways that are refreshingly non-exploitative. The film’s telling is so simple and its themes so effective that its issues become universal.

In a world where there are still pockets of women who are expected, even required, to be dutiful and submissive, to cover up not only their bodies but their expression of individuality in all its manifestations, it takes a film like “Mustang” to remind us of the bitter truth: sometimes the only solution is to escape.