The Hand That Hurts

“We didn’t go to Aunt Melek’s,” says five-year-old Cem (NIzam Schiller). “We waited really long for mommy.” Though his mother, Umay (Sibel Kekilli), tries to quiet him (“Eat your dinner”), the damage is done. Fuming, her husband Kemal (Ufuk Bayraktar) turns on the boy, slapping his head, then chasing him into a corner where he tries to hit him again. As Kemal’s parents and siblings sit silently, doing their best to focus on their plates, Umay rushes to stop Kemal, who slams her against a wall and locks her inside their bedroom. The scene cuts from Umay crouched in the dark to the table, a long shot emphasizing that her and Cem’s chairs are empty.

As this early scene in When We Leave (Die fremde) establishes Umay’s trauma, it aligns you with her efforts to escape. Inspired in part by the 2005 “honor killing” of Hatun Sürücü in Berlin, Feo Aladag’s first feature keeps a close focus on Umay’s experience, her fear and her resilience. To this point, her husband remains a cipher, for just a few moments later—including the requisite sex scene wherein he’s insensitive and she’s stoic, gazing from beneath him at an ominous ceiling fan—she’s on the bus from Istanbul to her parents’ home in Berlin. Here she’s greeted warmly until she reveals that Kemal is not coming along later, that she has, in fact, left him.

Umay’s father Kader (Settar Tanriögen) and mother Halime (Derya Alabora) respond with a mixture of horror and confusion, inclined to protect her but also devoted to the idea of her marriage. As voices rise again at the dinner table, Cem covers his ears, trying not to hear his uncle Mehmet (Tamer Yigit), who insists, “She’s not staying long.” Umay’s younger brother Acar (Serhad Can) sits with her later that evening, reassuring, “He didn’t mean it like that.” Umay knows better: “It’s exactly what he meant.”

What she means, and what she understands Mehmet and also her father to mean, is that she has no options. Kemal calls her a “German whore,” ruined by her nontraditional environment. Her father moans that he wishes she had been born a boy. Neither can accept that she is a product of her experiences, in relation to them and also apart. Still, Kader falls back on his own life to define her: she belongs to her husband, and so she must endure his abuse for the sake of her son. She tells no one in her family that she has had an abortion, though you’ve seen her at the doctor’s office, framed by sterile curtains and shadowy doorways, unable to move as she awaits the doctor’s approach.

Again and again, Umay looks caught and alone, even when she’s alongside her relatives. As she works with her mother in the kitchen, they stand with their backs to one another, Halime at the sink and Umay chopping vegetables, a wide white space between them. At times, the restrictions are plainly cultural, a function of Muslim tradition that closes in on all participants. When Umay wakes one morning to find Cem missing, she runs down the hallway, the camera close on her back, until Halime stops her short, informing her that Kader has taken him to Friday prayers. Though Halime assures her that it’s all right, touching her taut face and urging her daughter to eat (“You’re so skinny”), the scene cuts to the men at prayers, Cem gazing up at his grandfather in order to emulate his gestures and posture.

That’s not to say that the men’s attitudes are uniform or that Kedar isn’t conflicted. On the phone with Kemal’s father, he tries to cover up for his daughter (“You know how women can be”), unable quite to hear her concerns. When, one evening on the family room sofa, she tearfully confesses that Kemal beats her, Kedar recites, “The hand that hurts is also the hand that soothes, a slap or two is no reason to run.” He turns from her stricken face to the television, its ghostly light illuminating their strain and separation.

Though Umay imagines she might make a new life for herself, that she can get a job and return to school, her family feels she has “ruined” them. (This focus on reputation is especially acute when Umay’s sister blames her for spoiling her own chances for marriage, then reveals she must marry her boyfriend, because she’s pregnant.) This even though they have been living in Germany, where they’ve absorbed “new” customs, seeing that women can go out dancing and to school. Still, when Umay heads out one morning to visit with a friend and seek employment at the catering company where she works, Mehmet nods briefly toward Acar, signaling he should follow her. When she insists he let her go, the slips into a subway car before Acar can make a decision one way or the other, Mehmet erupts, hitting Acar just as Kemal has hit his wife and child.

Though you never see Kedar abuse his wife or children physically, it’s plain enough his sons have learned something from him. When Umay pleads with her mother to see her side, even to defend her, Halime is unable, even though her face reveals she understands; when Umay asks, “Do you want me to end up like you?” (then immediately apologizes), you see that both women know the costs of women’s submission and sacrifice, even if they believe it’s for the sake of their children.

As the film lapses occasionally into conventional melodrama and education (Umay finds another man, a German, who’s gentle and kind, her forward-thinking female employer visits her parents to articulate their daughter’s “condition”—much to their dismay, of course), its visuals are consistently effective, granting Umay as well as Kedar and Halime, sympathetic close-ups, melancholy lighting, and clarifying contexts. None is one-dimensional, and each embodies a particular pain.