A Regular Woman (2019)

Aynur (Almila Bagriacik) is a free-spirited lass of Kurdish/Turkish stock who was despatched from her home at the age of sixteen to marry her cousin. She had a child with the man but divorced him soon after before fleeing to a shelter for women in Berlin and determined not to fall back into the more traditional role of a woman in her family. Her parents are opposed to her more libertarian lifestyle but not so vehemently as her brothers Nuri (Rauand Taleb), Sinan (Mehmet Atesci) and Tarik (Aram Arami) who hatch a fairly gruesome plan to eliminate their wayward sibling and to bring up her five year old son Can - in the true faith. Now we start at the end of this semi-biopic about this woman, so we know just what happened and who did what so the film itself consists more of a retrospective from her point of view as she struggles for her independence, works to qualify as an electrician and even tries to date other men - all in the face of open and often violent hostility from her family and their community. Even her own mother shows little sympathy as her daughter tries to make her own way in life. As if the arc of this story isn't objectionable enough, the brothers' premeditation also runs to Nuri finding his own more suitable wife in the form of Evin (Lara Aylin Winkler) whose complicit purpose is altogether more sinister and who might not really be a Muslim at all. The considered and increasingly frustrated and frightened narration helps to guide us, but for the most part this is an almost documentary-style of production that allows us to observe that even in 21st century Germany the religious, parental and patriarchal cultures imported from their homeland still carry far more weight than the laws of their new land. Indeed, relentlessly intimidated by her younger brother she even reports matters to the police - but all to little avail! The biggest question you'll probably find yourself asking is why she didn't just get on a train somewhere with her lad and wave them all goodbye. Why? Well I suspect that in the end she held out for some sort of reconciliation in the belief that the love she had for her family might be reciprocated after time, and there is something engagingly optimistic about the powerful effort from Bageiacik on that front just as there is an effective odious one from Taleb's too. In some ways this reminded me of "A Girl in the River" (2015) and is quite an harrowing indictment of not just the behaviour of a family more concerned with "shame" and "reputation", but of the failings of a developed and sophisticated judicial system that still struggles to deal with lies and alibis.