In Turkish. 94 minutes long so just the right length. Five orphaned teenage sisters live with their grandmother in rural Turkey (1000 km from Istanbul). They're carefree schoolgirls one minute and then, following a "scandal," are more or less imprisoned in their home and paired off one by one in arranged marriages. Is this realistic? I don't think so, it seemed far too abrupt and radical a change to me.
Anyway, all of these girls are *stunningly* beautiful in their own way (obviously none of them is biologically related in reality). Spoiler: when did the uncle start raping them? Surely they wouldn't have passed the virginity test after that? Did he always live with them or just after the scandal broke? Did he rape the oldest two or just start with Ece?
There's tragedy, there's comedy, but the underlying story, this transition from secular to sacred (and eventual escape), didn't make sense to me. Having the girls cavort around in their underwear at length, lying on top of one another, made me a little uncomfortable. All of the long, close-up shots of their faces similarly "fetishizing" their beauty, their sexuality. What would people think if the director were a man instead of a woman?
In the end, when the two little ones run away to Istanbul, what can they expect? The have a few hundred Turkish lira and know one person there, what's going to happen to them? Should we be thrilled about their newfound "freedom?" As you can see, I had a lot of mixed feelings about this one. No fast forwarding so it earns a yellow (consider) rating.
