ABSTRACT
Stories about women who are caught in the clutches of strict customs and patriarchal traditions are prominent in the films of the 1980s. For instance, Ömer Kavur’s 1981 production Kırık Bir As¸k Hikayesi (The Story of a Broken Love) tells of a relationship that comes to an end due to the pressures of living in a strictly patriarchal neighbourhood. Fuat is forced into an arranged marriage with a rich girl to save his family from poverty. However, he is in love with Aysel, but the attitudes of the people in the village do not allow them to be together. At the end, Aysel has to leave the village and Fuat has to marry the other girl. The film does not directly aim at women’s issues, but it brings a critical approach to strict traditions and arranged marriage. Another film that uses the theme of oppressive environments is Yusuf
Kurçenli’s Ve Recep Ve Zehra Ve Ays¸e (And Recep And Zehra And Ays¸e) (1983). The film tells the story of the relationship between a husband and wife, Recep and Zehra, and two young girls Selma and Ays¸e who have trouble in reconciling the conflict between traditional and modern life. Ays¸e wants to go to the university but her father does not permit it, so she stays in the village. She then falls in love with the married Recep and runs away with him. Once the villagers discover this forbidden love affair, they pursue the couple and accuse Recep of raping Ays¸e. Recep goes to jail, and Ays¸e is immediately viewed as a fallen woman who has lost her chastity. Dorsay notes that the film is a story that takes place in a small village in Western Turkey, which works out ‘the contradiction between traditions, customs and conservative understandings of male-female relationships and freedom of love’.2 Indeed, the film criticises the harshness of repressive traditions and social pressures by the use of a lead female character who resists and challenges these norms. Bir Kadın Bir Hayat (One Woman One Life) (Feyzi Tuna, 1985) focuses
on the same theme. The film tells the story of a woman who feels trapped in a
marriage that has become routine. Her husband commits adultery and brings another woman home one day, and consequently they divorce. After the divorce the woman returns to the firm she used to work for before she got married. The film deals with the pressures that are imposed upon her by society, particularly when she has an affair with a married man. Bir Yudum Sevgi (A Sip of Love) (Atıf Yılmaz, 1984) is another example
of a film that deals with women in problematic relationships and unhappy marriages. Both Aygül and Cemal are married, but they fall in love and have an affair. The film focuses on unaffectionate, forced marriages and the struggle of both protagonists to escape from their unhappy lives. The heroine of the film, Aygül, is portrayed as a strong, independent woman who follows her desires despite the social pressures on her. In Ölü Bir Deniz (A Dead Sea) (Atıf Yılmaz, 1989) the female protagonist,
a businesswoman, feels suffocated by her marriage in which she is constantly serving her husband and son as if she was their slave. She takes a journey to a village in Southern Turkey in an attempt to escape from her husband and his friends. Here, she falls in love with a man with whom she has a sexual affair. What she realises at the end, as she becomes aware of the negative change in the man when he ‘has’ her (this refers to the male’s treatment of the female as an object to be used and then discarded), is that all the men in her life are the same. In the end, she unwillingly goes back to her old life. The film, the script of which is written by a woman filmmaker (Mahinur Ergun), does open a door to the female character to experience her sexuality and have a space of her own, but fails to offer a solution for her, apart from taking her back to her life in the city where she is a ‘slave’ of the patriarchal structure. The narrative of this film follows the order of problematic marriage – forbidden love affair with another person – back to the problematic marriage. This pattern is also seen in Feyzi Tuna’s Seni Kalbime Gömdüm (I Buried
You in My Heart) (1982). The film tells the story of a woman who is bored of her marriage and job, and who decides to go on holiday. While there she falls in love with a man, and claims a divorce from her husband in order tomarry him. In the meantime, however, her lover prefers to cultivate his bourgeois milieu and business connections, leaving her alone. The woman can do nothing but go back to her husband and her ‘real’ life. Another film from the same director, which deals with a similar theme, is
Bir Kadın Bir Hayat (One Woman One Life), which focuses on another woman in a routine marriage. Nuran’s husband has lost his desire for her and looks for sex outside the marriage. This hurts Nuran, but she starts a new life with a new job, and fights against the pressures put on her by society since becoming a single woman. According to Soykan, the film ‘seems able to but cannot overtly refer to women’s rights’, but manages to give the message of ‘how women can be divorced and be independent of a man, and still be powerful and live a happy life’.3 However, the happy ending when the family gets together again reinforces the idea of the importance and necessity of marriage in a woman’s life.
