Stills from "The Girl Left Home"
A house, five sisters whose parents have died, grandmothers and uncles who take care of them, successive weddings, and a truck, "The Girl Leaving Home" is a story about youth and death, love and affection, rebellion and exodus.
At the beginning of the movie, Riley, the youngest of the five sisters, hugs Teacher Di Li and does not let her go, and Di Li asks her to keep in touch. After saying goodbye, Riley and her sisters left school and went to the beach, carrying school bags and uniforms, and playing with a few male students. Their long hairs shone in the golden sun, their snow-white shirts were beaten by the sea, and their healthy and immature carcasses loomed, and they didn't care, even sitting on the boy's shoulders and playing a game of horseback fighting. So unscrupulous, so profligate, so open and free, this is the most beautiful and impressive scene in the whole "Girl Leaving Home".
After the end of the play time, the girls return home, are scolded by their grandmothers and uncles, and then they are put under house arrest and unable to go out, and are forced to learn sewing and cooking all day, not so much to find a good home for them, but rather to say that the adults (regardless of men and women) are afraid that if they do not "protect and discipline" these girls earlier, he will have troubles every day, and even endanger the institutional norms that adults are accustomed to.
The film represented France in the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film and was successfully shortlisted for the top five, and also received nine nominations for Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay at the César Award, the highest honor of French cinema (finally winning best original screenplay, editing, debut work, original music), but it was filmed in Turkey by the Turkish-born French director Denise Kanze Ahuffin, telling the story of Turkey.
There is a filming tidbit that is worth mentioning, the director found out that she was pregnant four weeks before the film started, and the producer actually sent a group letter to the world and left the team for this reason, and the producer himself was a woman. Fortunately, a substitute was found in a very short time. This episode that takes place outside the real scene echoes the situation faced by the five young girls in the play, and at the same time more subtly explains why most of the adult female characters in the story of "The Girl Leaving Home", in addition to The Teacher Di li, who only appears at the end of the opening credits and symbolizes progressive ideas, include grandmothers, aunts, neighbor wives, etc., whether they express sympathy and understanding for the girls' suffering, whether they deny the unequal treatment of women by national, religious, and social values. Whether they take an attitude of threats and inducements or earnest persuasion to the girls, they ultimately passively choose to stand on the side of the system and are unwilling to stand up and resist.
In addition to being reminiscent of the Australian director Peter Weir's 1975 teenage film classic Picnic at Hanging Rock, the portrayal of the plight of Muslim women is similar to Iranian director Jafapannagin's "The Circle" and "OFFSIDE". However, its closest is undoubtedly Sophia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" directed by Sophia Coppola in early 1999, using ethereal and beautiful images to interpret the story set in the 1970s when five young girls in Michigan committed suicide. I think that the reason why Denise Kanze Ahufen wrote this girlish film so similar to "Death Diary" must be to convey the eternal and unchanging plight of women—that is, the endless sorrow of youth that has no way out, and the pathological longing for death as the only solution.
Fortunately, "The Girl Left Home" does not flow into the self-indulgence of disease-free moaning. As the first feature film, Denise Kanze Ahufen's poetic capture of girlish feelings, the inner twists and turns of women in a closed environment who long to escape, and the kind of grasping of the flow of emotions and desires that are between romance and danger, both hazy and ambiguous, have achieved amazing results. After a large-scale audition of young girls in France and Turkey, the last four of the five sisters were appointed by ordinary actors, and under the successful guidance of Denise Kanze Ahufen, their performances were not only convincing, but also the extremely natural and poetic youthful atmosphere, which was the key to the capture of people's hearts in "The Girl Leaving Home".
Daenery Kanze Ahufen's narrative point of view of Riley, the youngest of the five sisters, is a clever strategy, while implicitly critical. From such a young girl who has not yet fully developed to see the four sisters' encounters - since actively seeking true love is a kind of resistance, deciding when and where to break is a kind of resistance, and seeking death is also a kind of resistance, so why not run away? Fleeing is not only a rebellion, but also a planning of delays, as well as the courage to respond to the situation. As long as there is a heart, the cage can also be flipped into a fortress to protect itself. The various cage symbols in the whole "Girl Leaving Home" were originally intended to achieve the cage being reversed into a fortress against patriarchy, that incredibly exciting moment!
The English title of "The Girl Leaving Home" mustang means wild horses. Home is like a cage for wild horses. Wild horses, on the other hand, belong to the steppes, and they find ways to break out of their cages and regain their freedom. However, Denise Kanze Ahufen is not naïve enough to equate the girls' "departure from home" with freedom, and the film ends with a symbolic picture full of hope but uncertain future, which is a sincere blessing from the creator and an affirmation of the courage needed for the girl to leave home.
Woolf once said that if you want to write, you must have money and your own room. In a closed country like "The Girl Leaving Home", there is not enough money and your own room, and it is best to have the freedom to decide on the opening and closing of your own doors and windows.