Oh Belinda follows an actress reluctantly agreeing to shooting for a shampoo commerical, only to experience a surreal turn of events when she gets transported into the world of the character she’s supposed to play.
Warning: This article contains heavy spoilers
Plot summary
Dilara Başaran is a famous actor who has awards and accolades, along with a beauty and privilege she sports with all the flamboyance of someone from the elite strata. She also has friends who make fun of her when she bags a shampoo commerical that has an unconventional script the contents of which she comes to know about at the last moment.
She is miffed when her theatre and actor friends pull her leg about it. She eventually accepts the commercial after learning the paycheck it proffers. At the shoot, she is unable to get into the character until she finally does, and as she closes her eyes under the shower, her surroundings change.
When she opens her eyes, she’s transported into the world of her character in the ad film. She’s thrown into disarray due to this absurd turn of events and as she tries to make sense of this reality-warping transformation, her new middle-class family try to contend with her inexplicable antics as well.
She eventually ends up at the hospital because of her freak outs but slowly gathers the courage to play the part as she tries to achieve similar success in this alternate reality as in her own. She also begins adopting to her new lifestyle as a wife and a mother.
Handan’s affair with the husband of her sister-in-law and the money laundering they were involved in catch up to Dilara as she faces rejection and defeat, only to finally break free of the illusion and wake up from the dream.
Oh Belinda ending explained in detail:
How does Dilara become Handan?
Dilara Başaran is an actress with a couple of big-time awards and accolades she is proud of; a loving boyfriend; friends who pull her leg but ultimately mean well. She also has a new ad shoot under her belt.
It’s about a shampoo brand by the name of “Belinda.” However, her contentions with the commerical is with its script, which has her play the role of a abiding wife from a middle class family, with two small kids and a husband, as well as a job in the bank.
At the shoot, Dilara has a hard time getting into the role which she only accepted because of the paycheck in the first place, as her director friend Timo tries to get her to emulate a better performance.
She manages to get into the zone finally, as the shower head above her pours water on her hair, she closes her eyes and opens them, only to find that everyone around her has disappeared and she is in the bathroom of a house she has never been in.
When she comes out of the shower she sees two kids playing about as their father lays back on the couch playing a video game. In a haze and profound confusion, she looks around and interrogates everything and everyone, wondering if all of this is just an elaborate prank of some sort.
The mustached man calling her his wife refers to her by the name of “Handan”, and after a series of perplexing encounters with this alternate reality and its elements, Başaran comes to realize that she has somehow transported into the world of Handan, the character she was just trying to play at the commerical shoot.
How does Dilara return to the real world?
Dilara’s adventures and misadventures are fueled by the power of believing and empathy. When she truly starts making an effort at connecting with Handan during the shoot, she finds herself transported to her world.
She spends the entirety of Oh Belinda trying to contend with this life and identity she’s stuck with, along with the middle class struggles that it comes with. However, she eventually starts accepting and embracing the roles she has to play, while trying to simulate the success she had in the reality outside of the ad-world.
At the end of Oh Belinda, Dilara gets rejected by Serkan and others before the play begins. They learn about Handan’s status as a middle-class banker and not an actor as she has lied to them earlier, which is why they reject her. She goes up to the roof, with the bag of money that Handan had apparently hid in her house, and performs the same dance as Arzu’s in the play.
She finally believes in herself, in her talent and abilities that this ad-world so vehemently rejects and even treats as lunacy. When she closes her eyes in the rain, she finds herself back in the real world when she opens them, at the same place and instance of the commercial shower scene.
Does Dilara get transported into alternate reality?
Dilara has trouble getting into the character of Handan. When she finally decides to give it a go, she transports herself into her world. She throws hands and leg trying to make sense of this transportation where she has to literally embody the character as the script is brought into tangible realization.
She has a husband she feels no attraction to, and two kids who she does begin to care for after initially using them as a shield against Necati’s inappropriate sexual advances.
There’s no explicit mention in Oh Belinda of Dilara getting transported into Handan’s world as being a reality-hopping event that’s rooted in physics.
However, there’s a rather tacit explanation for her absurd adventures which is that it’s an allegorical mess wherein she has to shed her elitist world view and connect with the woes of middle-class women that are real even to this day.
When she embraces her lifestyle she becomes more capable of empathizing with Handan and while she chooses to chart her own way to success like in the real-world, she finds that the system and the patriarchal society drags her down anyway.
There’s no win for women in a society working against them, and this realization of the struggles of a middle class woman is Oh Belinda‘s likely answer for Dilara’s surreal swap with her character as the ad script comes to life.
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