In a rural village in Turkey, Meryem (Ozgu Namal) is rapped. When she won't say the name of the man who did it to her, she is sentenced to death for her sin. Her stepmother, who has never liked her, gives her a rope and tells her to hang herself to restore honor to the family. However, she doesn't give her stepmother the satisfaction of watching her commit suicide. When the soldiers start to hear the village people (not the bad) gossiping about Meryem, the leader of the town decides to get her out of the village and kill her. He assigns his own son, Cemal (Murat Han), who just returned home from the Army, to take her to Istanbul and make sure she doesn't come back alive.
Cemal and Meryem take a train to Istanbul and Cemal plans to throw her off the train. However when he sees how innocent he looks when she is sleeping he looses his courage. They go to Cemal's disowned brother to seek advice on the matter. His brother tries to tell him that their village culture doesn't make any sense in today's society and he doesn't need to do this. But Cemal doesn't listen. He takes Meryem to a bridge, points a gun at her, and tells her to jump so her blood is not on her hands. She tells him to tell her father she did nothing wrong and not to worry because she will be joining her mother in heaven. She blindfolds herself and is about to jump, when at the last moment Cemal pulls her back. He realizes that he cannot let this young girl die.
They get help from one of Cemal's army buddies and take a temporary job and housing on a fish farm. That's where they met Irfan (Talat Bulut), an old professor sailing on a boat. When Cemal's services are no longer needed at the fish farm and they have to leave, Irfan offers them a job working on his boat. Everything seems to be going fine at first and Irfan thinks that Cemal and Meryem are married. When he finds out that this isn't so he gets very upset at Cemal, saying he wanted to get away from all the lies and deceit in his everyday life. After an apology, Irfan says that they can stay on the boat and all seems to be going fine again, until Irfan's wife shows up. She gives him divorce papers and when leaving plants the idea in Cemal's head that something is going on between Irfan and Meryem. Cemal, feeling jealous, threatens Irfan and later gets drunk that night.
When Cemal wakes up, he finds himself all alone on the boat. His mind starts going to the worst possible idea, when actually Irfan is just teaching Meryem about fishing and sailing. When they return Cemal has a freak out. He slaps Meryem across the face for being a whore and then starts to strangle Irfan with a rope, saying he wasn't a pimp and he wasn't going to allow him to do anything to Meryem. Meryem, who found a gun on the boat earlier in the movie, fires it into the air. She explains that nothing is going on between them and then points the gun at herself, not sure why Cemal even let her live. Cemal takes the gun away from her and she calms down. Later while she is fast asleep, Irfan explains that he thinks of Meryem as a daughter and they have a nice laugh about the whole strangling incident.
This whole time, Cemal's father sent a group of men after Cemal. He told them to kill the girl but bring Cemal back alive so that he can punish him himself. The next day when Cemal and Irfan are working off the boat, Irfan confesses that he is in love with Meryem. But while they are working the men catch up to Meryem and kidnap her. Cemal sees them driving away and takes off after them with Irfan. When the men and Meryem arrive on the surface she struggles and manages to get away. She takes off into the field with one man right behind her. It starts to bring back flashes of what happened to her before. Cemal and Irfan knock out the men and manage to save her just in time, but her flash backs cause her to say the rapists name out loud for the first time.
Okay, so I didn't give away the whole ending because there is a little bit more to it, but that's pretty much the whole movie and for that I am sorry. It just was one of the those movies that made me wish I knew more about the culture. I found myself looking things up during the movie to try and understand it better. Now don't get me wrong I got the gist off it, but it's just hard to think people still think that way. The movie was shot really well. With drastic color changes throughout the movie. I may be thinking to much on it because I'm not sure if the color represented Meryem's growth as an individual or if it was more the journey of getting away from the bleak village that was so void of color it might as well have been black and white. There were some editing choices I didn't really care for though. Mainly unnecessary fade all the way to black and fade back in moments. I'm assuming this wasn't a made for TV movie. But there my pretentious film watcher is gone.
Rating: ****
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