The movies I will reference here are Mustang, The Insult, Two Days One Night, I Daniel Blake and The Third Murder. I will not use a particular order. I am also looking at one common theme that I found across five films. This might be the most obvious theme but the theme that I observed in the films is hardship and perhaps, even more, the overcoming of the hardship. Every film presented characters that faced unimaginable hardship even by today’s standards and in the end being able to endure and overcome the obstacles they each had.
In Mustang, which is a film about a family in Turkey and takes place in what seems like a remote village and follows the story of five sisters, Lale, Nur, Selma, Ece, and Soney. These sisters were up against extreme family traditions that gradually remove all types of “corruption” far from them with the end goal to make them 'appropriate spouses'. The nature of this film seemed unexpectedly light and even comical in scenes for a film with such a focus on the real issue. The sisters are not characterized by the plot like you typically see in the situation with this sort of film and story. In the story, the hardship is the thing that the sisters need to endure for the sake of religious convention enforced by their family. The struggle and hardship in this film are shown through a child's view, Lale’s. Each girl had no choice in what their outcome in life was going to be. Particularly who they got to spend the rest of their life with. Not only that but also the fact that they were all underage. At every angle, they had no choice. The only choice they did have was if they live or die. Perhaps that is why Soney took her life? She decided to take control of the only thing she felt like she could control. In the end, two make it out two get married off and one takes her own life. They overcame! Some of the sisters perhaps vicariously but they were sisters and the two that ran away were free from the oppression. Lale was able to outsmart those that she trusted to take care of her. Lale and here sisters trusted their legal guardians and they imposed their religion on them.
In The Insult, the film explores tribal grudges, personal pain, and political tragedies in intricate layers to tell a story. The hardship was about how a personal insult between two individuals Toney and Yasser of different backgrounds ignites an escalating altercation involving verbal, then a physical attacks, and ultimately brief mass skirmishes between Lebanese Christians and Palestinian Muslims in Beirut. Ending up in court, you watch as ironically, the accuser and defense become pawns at the hands of their legal teams and the inflamed public. Something that could have been more easily settled through private negotiation becomes a public stage expressing age-old and deep-seated cultural and individual rage and pain. What seems at first to be an unnecessary exaggeration of a fight between two individuals reveals itself finally as a representation for understanding many larger tensions in the Middle East. Years of building up this bad blood valid or not created unintentional tension. They both overcame the hardship and perhaps not entirely due to the nature but none the less they did. It was maybe how most men would settle disputes given the opportunity. Toney ended up punching Yassar. I believe that this was how they overcame even though Toney lost his case in court.
In Two Days One Night, the film is about a woman named Sandra who faces being laid off after being getting depression and being off work for a period so that her co-workers can get a bonus. Since she wants to keep her job she goes to each co-workers to convince them to vote for her to stay. It's hard not to sympathize with Sandra simply because her situation is so dire yet relatable. Amidst economic uncertainty, the prospect of losing one's job is difficult, even in a semi-socialist society like France's not to mention the post-depression she was dealing with. The hardship for Sandra and for her peers was a question that we all face or have come to face. When you are handed with a hard decision, do you go with the selfish option or do you stand in defense of your peers? The answer to this isn't definitively given by some of her peers and she has to endure the uncertainty of the outcome. She overcame by pushing herself to go and convince whoever she could to vote for her to stay. In the end, she loses her vote to keep the job but walks out with hope. Hope because she fought. She gave it everything she could and in the process found out that there are a people that care for her. Perhaps her hope, in the end, was that if she could overcome this then anything was possible.
In I Daniel Blake is a film about a 59-year-old worker who recently experienced a heart problem. Medical matters have concluded his employed days and he had to depend on government aid to stipend the his living condtions. He then finds out that he is supposed to go back to work even though his doctor says otherwise, he’s perplexed because his health information isn’t relating with benefit sources information about his health. sending Daniel, who does not understand computers, on an endless chase to get his benefits back, reluctantly he puts himself into the web of social services, where every choice to go on living is surrounded behind confusing form-filling and government requirements. During this aching ride, Daniel meets Katie, a solo mother of two who has no way to provide for her kids. She is dealing with her own shame as it quietly destroys her and forces her to make unthinkable decisions to provide for her kids. The hardship in this story is that Daniel is forced down avenues he does not understand like using a computer to fill out a form and his health is in bad shape. In this process, he learns what it means to rely on the governments' process. He did not necessary overcame this hardship as he never got to find out because he had a heart attack and dies before he could. But I think that what he did for Katie and her kids was in a way overcoming hardship.
In the Third Murder, the film revolves around a murder-robbery suspect, Misumi, who did time for murder many years back, and who will be sentenced to death should he be found guilty of this new crime. Despite the threat of capital punishment, with its hard balancing of justice scales, Misumi confesses that he did, in fact, commit the crime. His main attorney, Shigemori, is accustomed to winning court cases and wants to save his client from execution. His own investigation of the murder leads him into a complex of shifting truths, where justice seems beyond ascertaining. The Shigemori goes into exploring more or less the motives behind the murder or at least that is where most of your attention is mostly because you already know that Misumi did it. The hardship in this film is that Misumi is faced with a choice and from what we find out in the film it is a choice that he has made in the past and that is to kill a person. We also later find out why he killed the man that used to be his boss. Misumi's boss was also molesting his daughter Sakie. He made that choice to take a life and give justice as he saw was necessary. That is perhaps how Misumi overcame the hardship. By making the choice to remove a monster from the face of this planet knowing well of what his outcome was going to be. But if it meant that one girl was going to be free from that monster then I think he was ok with the consequences of his actions.
All of the films I referenced tell the story in a similar manner. The character is faced with a difficult problem. Each of the characters took the way they best knew how and tried to figure out how they could overcome their situation. And with each film, the theme stood out. Each film gives me some relatability in their problems. Particularly those that tell the story of struggles with work and health as these are things I always think about and deal with as we all do. You cannot watch these films and not somehow draw a connection to your own life.