In Belkis Bayrak’s Gülizar, Gülizar’s (Ecem Uzun) and her fiancé Emre’s (Bekir Behrem) gazes never manage to meet. As one looks up, the other looks down, and each finds their desire for understanding, for steady ground in the other, frustrated over the course of mere seconds. It’s small and apparently inconsequential, but Bayrak telegraphs this miniature tragedy time and again in the film, and each time it lands with heartbreaking heft within an already heartbreaking film.
The film, written and directed by Bayrak, follows 22-year-old Gülizar as she travels from Turkey to Kosovo to marry Emre. It’s an arranged marriage that Gülizar looks forward to, hoping it will allow her autonomy and self determination. A bureaucratic inconvenience means that she must travel to Kosovo by bus alone. When she disembarks at a rest stop to use the washroom, she gets sexually assaulted by a man — Bayrak is careful and slight here, leaving us with a dark screen and only the sounds of the attack. Gülizar’s shrieks and desperate attempts at defense cut through the darkness like daggers through cloth, the man’s shushing sounding like a slimy snake on your skin. The assault takes place a mere 15 minutes into the film, and for the rest of the story, Gülizar attempts to wear a mask of happiness that everyone around her expects of a young woman at the precipice of life, while silently dealing with the attack, shock and trauma seizing control of her when she least expects it.
Emre finds out about the assault fairly early on and is adamant about securing justice for Gülizar. He swiftly takes her to the authorities — his uncle, Bilal (Hakan Yufkacigil), is head of police — and tries to file a complaint, but Bilal says that though he will remain vigilant for the attacker, the couple is best off forgetting about the incident. Gülizar, already hesitant about describing the event or her attacker, finds Bilal’s idea compelling, and tells Emre that she just wants to move on. But it’s easier said than done, and the event continues to weigh heavily on her. Even as she wearies of Emre’s attempts to find justice, Gülizar herself can’t manage to forget, her body betraying her through her trauma responses, panic attacks and despondency.
On the face of it, Bayrak’s tale is straightforward — through a linear form she delineates how one woman responds to sexual violence. But sit with it a while and Gülizar reveals itself to be breathtaking, sharp, and unruly. Bayrak subverts expectations to show that there really is no right way to respond to trauma and the traumatic, and the cadence of her subversion follows the unexpected movement of trauma within the body itself.
There is a frisson between words and feelings here. Emre is steadfast in his pursuit of justice because he cares for and loves his new bride, because he is a good man, and also because it is the proper thing to do. As soon as he learns of the attack, he embarks on a series of actions that are categorically right. He clings to rules and regulations when he learns of what happened because there are rules and regulations at all in place for when something terrible happens. It’s not so easy for Gülizar. Emre is confounded by her when she doesn’t respond with excitement or relief when he tells her that Bilal might have apprehended her attacker, disappointed by her dispiritedness. And when Gülizar asks him how she ought to respond, she means it as a genuine question; because while there are things that can be done, things that Emre does, in the aftermath of an attack, there are no right things or feelings for a person to feel after an assault. Emre does try to make things okay, but, well intentioned as his actions are, often his attempts trigger panic attacks in Gülizar, his efforts to make her feel okay seeming too extreme and too much in line with his active conception of healing. He doesn’t pause to ask Gülizar what she needs, his linear understanding of healing doesn’t leave room for any of Gülizar’s contradictory and complex feelings. And Gülizar doesn’t vocalize what she needs because I don’t think she knows yet, and thus their gazes pass each other by, with neither one able to offer the other what they need. While Emre does all the right things, his words seem to fail him, and while Gülizar says that she wants to speed into the future and forget about the past, her actions speak to a vital need for slowness, for healing.
The attack leaves dark and mottled bruises on Gülizar’s body that we catch desultory glimpses of. On their wedding night, when Emre sees them, he, who was so kind and supportive of Gülizar earlier, turns away from her, finally seeing the violence done to her. He looks down at his hands, for the first time understanding the pain she has been in during and despite his attempts to fix things, and she looks down her nose at him, as if daring him to look her in the eye, to really see her as she is. But, abashed, he can’t. Emre here seems to realize that this has been something not up to him to fix — words are easy to dole out, but actually grasping their meaning, what necessitates them, is another matter entirely. I wonder if Emre truly registers the weight of the attack before seeing her bruises.
In this instant Bayrak shrewdly tumbles our expectations of her characters — we expect Emre’s kindness and warmth, just as earlier we might have expected his coldness upon learning of her assault — and of trauma’s manifestation, changeable and mercurial, never appearing as a familiar. On her wedding night, Gülizar seems to realize not only that the incident was something she cannot forget, but also that her unique grief might stay with her for a while. Armed with this realization that Bayrak has nudged Gülizar toward, the director offers us a denouement that is as much a beginning as it is an end, fading to black on a scene wherein the protagonist seems to look both backwards and forwards, seems to not have shrugged off her past. Bayrak’s form, in other words, is patient and expectant, understanding that Gülizar’s trauma and grief is still with her.
Bayrak’s hand is slight, leaving more unsaid than said here. Through a poetically measured visual vocabulary — she maintains a gossamery, tender watch over Gülizar as she slowly unravels as a woman saddled so soon after something traumatic with the addled pressure of performing happiness — she offers a jagged and prickly tale about how expectation and reality hardly ever manage to meet each other’s gazes. Uzun is breathtaking in her delicate performance as a woman being pulled by so many forces, at times frantic, at others pensive as she bestows Gülizar with the soul of a mourner, watching her visions for her life carried away on Kosovo’s sleepy breeze.
Gülizar is ultimately challenging as it refuses to give us any easy answers, leaving us to pick up the pieces after expectations have been dashed, to figure out how futures are built from ashes. A masterfully crafted debut, Gülizar is unafraid to look you in the eye as it asks you to limn the contours of hope itself.
