Lal gece (2012)

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Lal gece (2012)

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In spite of all the humanitarian efforts, there is still a widespread prevalence of child marriage in rural Eastern Turkey. Young girls who barely graduate from high school are betrothed to suitable bachelors. In some extreme cases, girls as young as 12-13 are married off to men old enough to be their grandfathers. Child brides have always been used in Turkish cinema and almost all of the previous movies simply blamed the patriarchal authority. Women consent to their fate shaped up by their fathers and husbands and young men don't really question their roles assigned to them by their forefathers. Women are naturally the victim while the men are the unquestionable oppressor.

Reis Çelik's 'Nigh of Silence' is different in a way that it tries look into the world of a child marriage inside. Without trying lose his objectivity, Mr Çelik wants to put us in the shoes of both the bride and the groom. The nameless groom is played by silver screen veteran İlyas Salman and the bride is played by Dilan Aksüt in her debut role.

In the opening sequences we see the bride paying his homage to two unidentified graves. Apparently he served quite a long time in prison and now he's back in village and he's supposed to marry the girl who is chosen for him. Reis Çelik is known for his documentary skills so the opening sequences show us a wedding which, for a moment, makes you feel like you are going to watch a documentary. The nonprofessional people used the in the wedding lacks any acting skills so the dialogue sounds quite stilted. Most of the movie is actually a high strung chamber film. The child bride knows exactly what she is supposed to do. She knows the traditional customs 'she arrived there in a white wedding dress and she'll leave only in a funeral shroud'. She is so young, so delicate that she tries anything to put off consummating their marriage in their nuptial chamber. The groom notices her delicacy and tries anything to persuade her. The groom is probably the most genteel man you would ever meet in such a culture. Reis Çelik wants us to see things from his window. He practically humanizes the groom. He is too victimized by the very customs, traditions, destiny he lives in. He is, too, helpless like the bride. He doesn't face up to the set of rules of defined by him. He doesn't defy his fate that was cut out for him years ago. In one of the most didactic scenes in the movie he even loses it and calls himself a clown and says: 'My mother says, "Marry this girl." I marry her. "Divorce her," she says. I divorce her. My uncle says, "Your mother's a stain on our honour." I kill my mother." 'Lal Gece' has a deliberately slow pace so it may feel a bit languorous, affectedly pensive or just lackadaisical for general cinema goers and that might explain why it attracted so few viewers at the theatre. For this very reason it does not really offer a scathing, harsh commentary but it might just give you some raw insight into the social conditions where the women are labelled as victims and the men are victimizers.

IMDB Reviewer

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Lal gece (2012)

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