Daughter in Law Film Difficulty Ranking: 3
Why Watch Daughter in Law?
- Feel the isolation of living alone in the Turkmen desert with your father in law.
- Grasp onto the last threads of hope with a young woman dreaming of her husband returning from war.
- For a ritualistic transcendental film from Soviet Turkmenistan.
From: Turkmenistan, Asia Watch: YouTube, IMDb Next: When the Tenth Month Comes, Uski Roti, Beatriz's War
The Isolation of the Desert
You can’t escape the desert in Daughter in Law. The daughter and father in law are completely isolated by it with only their camels and sheep for company. To emphasize the limits of their daily world, the camera never ventures more than 500 meters from their home. The only contact they have with the outside world are in the weekly visits of the Communist collective that arrive distribute their rations. But their regular visits don’t diminish the threats to their livelihood, such as a contaminated well. It’s them vs. the desert.
Unspoken Communication
But it’s not like they don’t know and love each other. Both the father and daughter in law seem to be completely in sync with one another. Instead of speaking to each other, they seem to anticipate exactly what the other is thinking. You can see this from the opening scene in which the daughter in law feeds tea to her resting father in law and helps him out of the sand and into his clothes without saying a word. It’s as if they’ve been in isolation together so long that they don’t need to speak to understand each other anymore.
Ritualistic cinema
In a way, their lack of conversation and isolation from the rest of the world appear like a period of mourning similar to the ritualistic styles of Cocote or Verde. The daughter in law’s husband has been away in the war for a long period of time and still hasn’t sent news of his whereabouts. The signs don’t appear good in the snippets of news we hear from their guests. The visual style also hints that he’s never coming back. The slow pacing, lack of conversation and energy, and repetitive everyday tasks resemble the solemnity that accompanies a period of mourning. Director Khodzha Kuli Narliyev creates this feeling of mourning so we can assume what happened to the husband and observe the daughter in law tragically holding on to the thin threads of hope.
Keeping her husband alive
However, even though her father in law asks her to move on, the daughter in law never gives up hope. To keep her husband alive, she dreams of him and inserts visions of him into her daily life. When his relatives come to visit, she imagines him walking over the sand dunes with them; when she’s alone at home, she dresses up and talks to his picture; and whenever she hears the sounds of a plane, she imagines him landing and taking her up into the sky with him. If she can keep dreaming of him, she preserves his memory and can therefore keep him alive forever.
What to Watch Next
Daughter in Law reminded me a lot of When the Tenth Month Comes from Vietnam. Both feature wives waiting and hoping for their husband to return from war and both women never give up even though all hope looks lost.
You could also watch Beatriz’s War, in which a husband goes missing during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor only to reappear many years later.
Or for more films about women waiting around for their husband, check out Uski Roti set in rural India.
Or to watch more transcendental films that embody periods of mourning into the feeling of the film, watch Verde and Cocote, both from the Dominican Republic.
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