If a person is middle-aged and has no children but five daughters, what would you do? Marry them—this is Jane Austen’s answer to Mrs. Bennet. Marriage, family, husband, and children seem to have always been the fate of women, and they also provide them with the material basis for their survival. The general improvement in the status of women and the change in society’s stereotypes about the roles of the sexes are only a matter of nearly a hundred years in the most enlightened and open country today. In 2013, "Pride and Prejudice" was published for two centuries, and the Turkish director Deniz Gamze Erguwen is also preparing to make her first feature film. This is the director's biweekly unit of this year's Cannes Film Festival. "Wild Horse" in Chinese. Different time and space, different language and culture, the same five girls; if we ask the parents the same question as above, the answer is the same: "Marry them out" is also the only choice for a modern Turkish conservative family. The story begins on the last day of a certain school year in a rural school, and it is also the first day of summer vacation-the happiest time for everyone in their teenage years. But the film opened with crying. Lalai, the youngest of the five sisters, waved goodbye to his favorite teacher in tears, because the teacher will move to the capital, Istanbul, as soon as the semester is over. On the way home, the sisters decided to walk, passing by the charming beach in summer, and playing with a few boys and their clothes. After returning home, everything went downhill. A neighbor saw a scene on the beach and complained to his grandmother. The five girls were taught one by one. Lalai led his sisters into a fierce resistance. The five sisters lost their parents since childhood and were raised by grandma and uncle in a large family. After experiencing this incident, the family decided to terminate the girls’ studies, put them at home, and teach them how to become "good women" in the traditional sense. The story goes back and forth in repression and struggle, but the sisters’ fate is settled one by one, showing a typical situation under agency marriage: the eldest sister was lucky enough to marry her lover, and the second sister married a proposer who had never met before. , The third child committed suicide. Only when Lalai realized that she had to take fate in her own hands, she began to learn to drive secretly and establish contact with the outside world. Eventually, she made a big fuss about the wedding of the four sisters, and the two fled to Istanbul together. Born in Turkey, Erguwen graduated from the prestigious French film school La Fémis, the shots in "Wild Horse" all carry the French academy's persistent pursuit of aesthetic images. But is it appropriate to use such beauty to tell a serious, depressing or even sad story? The director said that the aesthetics and narrative of the film were directly influenced by Pasolini's "One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom", describing the most shocking reality in an alienated gesture. This kind of alienation causes great discomfort to the viewer. The contrast between the beauty of the image and the grief of the plot creates a dizzying sense of absurdity. It shakes people's aesthetic stability and forces (rather than invites) us to reflect. Although Erguwen’s feature film debut is shocking in content, it is a well-regulated student essay in structure. You can find all the clues throughout the first few scenes as long as you read it carefully. At the beginning of the film, Lalai cried on the happiest day of the year (the first day of summer vacation). This contradiction between what should be and the plot is repeated throughout the film: the energetic bodies and minds of the five girls should be He is as happy and unrestrained as a free little wild horse, but is trapped in a cage at home by the restraints of ethics and traditions. Another clue is the teacher. As a modern and liberating female image, she is obviously a role model for students, and the Istanbul she is moving to is a beacon in the hearts of girls. Lale asked people countless times in the film, since this small village is so closed and conservative, why not go to Istanbul. "Far" is the answer she gets every time, as if she is saying that freedom is so far away, and the opportunity to escape fate is elusive. Lalai’s final escape is the director’s response to the distance of freedom: girl, you must rely on yourself to reach the other side of freedom. No one will pity you, because even the closest grandmother and uncle are people whose thinking is bound by traditional ethics, and their "good for you" actually has nothing to do with you. People live in a model where the old ethics of cannibalism is labeled "good", so they want to keep copying this model. Lalai must arm his mind and hands, learn to drive, learn to communicate with others, and learn to use extremely limited resources. Speaking of "learning", education is the fundamental means to solve the status of women. This is a piece of information that Erguwen has not concealed in the film, and it is also a point of view and even belief that she has repeatedly emphasized in interviews. So at the end of the film, Lalai took his sister to Istanbul and found the former female teacher directly. The intellectual woman is not only a role model for the heroine, but also a metaphor given by a female director. She is a symbol of modern women's self-reliance and control of their own destiny. Like many debut works, "Wild Horse" also has a strong autobiographical nature. At the beginning of the film, the girls are punished for playing purely with boys on the beach, which is entirely out of personal experience. different Yes, Erguwen did not resist like Lalai, but silently endured it. Her anger and injustice came afterwards, so she wanted to make a movie to smash the paranoid conservatism that was suspicious when she saw men and women getting along. But soon she and we realized that nothing can do this, except the girl herself. The girl who defeated conservative ethics was not the director El Guwen, who was a guest at Cannes, but Deniz, a film school student who studied hard in Paris. (Published in "Beijing Youth Daily Literary and Art Review" July 17, 2015, with deletions and corrections.)
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