Turkish Delight: Only For Adults or Those in the Grip of Mad Love or Those who have once been and now Remember Vividly
Young, mad love is some kind of a veritable monster.
To hold her by the waist turn her full circle dizzy in the head intense surge through the viens your six senses overload with an electric pulse reality dissolves into your being you into her and she into yours the moment, the now is within the two of you. The universe gone bonkers. Lips smash into each other with a full wet impact. All laws are suspended interrupted. Lights strobe gravity fails rotate revolve the earth balanced on a tiny pin set in swirling motion by a force like a beautiful gust blown straight through your hair from the beyond the star-lit aurora borealis horizon of the sea. Her nipples hard. Tug at your exploding crotch.You grab at each other, launch towards, collide. In Saliva. In Sweat. In flesh and blood. In a powerful fusion-fission of the senses. Fire-works and candy pop and a street lit with a million candles and a cheering blurry carnival of neon and Buddy Guy breathing down mad at his guitars until Hendrix joins him for a burning duet, Janis screaming banshee at the vocals and run and run, run, run, run, run and exult with your hands in the air.
All that is to grab each other like only those in the grip of young, mad love can do. The kind of love that hands out strange repercussions.
Panic in the streets. Watch out the old lady in the glitter kanjiveeram just fainted and has to be rushed to the nearest ICU. Uncle made out of expensive bits of Louis Phillipe stands agape, horror up his spine, heart beating fast. The priest shuts the doors of God and declares a divine emergency for the Gods to lift up their hemlines and make a quick sprint to a safe zone. The sleazoid cop gets his kicks and now moves in malevolently on two gentle beings in a moment so maddening, so sensual, it can only be love.
Young, mad love is truly some kind of a monster. Scream, faint, alert the authorities. Red Alert. Sound the siren all across the city, the TV, the rags. Love has swept into town looking all cherry sexy and all decency is about to be blown away.
True love is most definitely ‘dirty’. But not like your kindergarten teacher taught you to say the word in the line of ‘go wash your hands’. Think more like Elvis Presley with that voodoo voice of his leaning into the mike with a sly smile and a wink at the audience which every teenage girl in the audience feeling the heat of the mojo will think her own, say nay sing nay growl the word out in a glow of amber. Dirty.
Love makes the world go around. Sure it was great meeting you in a gin joint in Casablanca and sorry babe I can’t stick with you and it doesn’t amount to a helluva lot of beans anyway but ‘we’ll always have Paris’.
The secret word is ‘Paris’.
It was in this metaphorical, geographical, historical city of gray skies, magic lights and dirty love that the giddiness of the emotion first found itself on screen. Jules, Jim and Catherine seem to almost glide on love as they run wild. Franz, Odile and Arthur flinging themselves against time and law and common sense as they dash through the Louvre. At the heart of true, mad, young love lies a great vertiginous velocity that the masters of the New Wave distilled and pretty soon Bonnie and Clyde were at it and with guns and raising hell and a sizeable body count. (Wow) But true to the fleeting madness of love, a despair would creep in even in the films of the original masters themselves but time and again there still arrives a vision so romantic, so high on love, so inspired with the speed the insanity of it all that inspite of the world crumbling around him, his lovers would collide, if even briefly, in beautiful explosions of light.
(Pause to reflect on what makes ‘Daud’ (The closest Bollywood ever got to Pierrot Le Fou) a great film. It is not the peripheral quirkiness or the sheer inanity for the sake of it but the crackling chemistry and constant free associative volatile banter between Nandu and Bhavani and the romantic notions that RGV copiously infuses in his film.)
Magic is the color of the thing you wear
With a dragon for a button
And a lion for a lamp
With a carrot for a collar
And a salmon for a zipper.
Hey! You’re turning me on: baby,
That’s the way it’s going down.
WOW!
- Richard Brautigan, It’s Going Down
Paul Verhoeven’s ‘Turkish Delight’ opens with a brutal bludgeoning and a bullet to the head and quickly cuts to a more elaborate and brutal sequence of torture and murder. Elaborate fantasies of a man trapped in some kind of a warp. We see the man indulging in these lurid fantasies lying in his apartment which has all the aesthetic of a neglected public restroom rise after his speculations and quickly pin a naked picture of the girl from his fantasies and frantically jerk off to her.
The film begins in a strange and unsettling void amidst morbid bleakness and decay. But instead of sinking into the sickness of melancholy as art-house films will be apt to do there is a strange energy to these sequences.
The love story is kept suspended for a while and in the meantime, with pride and swagger Verhoeven decides to strut out his primary mission. Shock the bourgeois. Denounce. Decry. Ridicule. Insult. Verhoeven is acclaimed more for his balancing acts between trash and art rather than subtleties and this early breakthrough film is proof. His critique is full-bodied, visceral and he never shies away from the slightest opportunity to take a glorious dig in the face of society’s supposed decencies and moralities.
Thus begins a whirlwind montage of the protagonist Erik who first we saw fantasizing murder and jerking off, seducing a number of women across ages and social strata from innocent seeming young girls to Christian mothers to women who have clearly crossed their prime and ferociously bed them in his dump of an apartment. Verhoeven initially portrays Erik as despicable protagonist- an enfant terrible, an egoist, hustler, manipulator and malicious womanizer but the biting comedy, the excited pace and the brash charisma with which Rutger Hauer plays him have you wildly rooting for Erik even before the love story has commenced.
Erik enters his apartment with another random girl he has picked up. They have already started pulling their clothes off each other before they have even entered the home and suddenly, Erik has a beautiful vision. A girl bathed in sparse moonlight. He moves closer only to discover it is a statue.
The love story unfolds in flashback.
We have already seen Erik run into around a half dozen women but when he first encounters Olga the spark is evident. Falling headlong. Young, mad love. She picks him up hitchhiking and the talk is charged, exuberant, the chemistry is instant and passionate. Stolen touches. Flirting. Soon enough, they park their car and are all over each other in the pure ecstasy of the moment. After their bout of passion, Erik’s penis gets caught in a vicious knot in his zipper (25years before There’s Something About Mary) and they have to borrow a set of pliers to set him free. On the way back tragedy strikes and the car swerves out of control and topples over. Olga loses all consciousness while Erik stunned and bloodied carries her in his arms, limping on the highway trying to get a car to stop and help. Provocateur that he is Verhoeven mines the scene for shock, violence and gore but here for the first time, a sense of melodrama is suggested. Through the tragedy and horror of the accident the bonds between Olga and Erik are sealed. It is a scene of searing romance as the blood-soaked Erik stumbles and staggers onto an uncaring highway of zooming cars holding his beloved like a torn rag doll in his arms, standing tall against the glaring sun, all for the sake of love.
Following the accident, the lovers face a brief period of separation only to run into each other at where else but a country fair with Olga spinning wildly in the technicolor frenzy of the Carousel as Erik stands close carrying on a conversation with her, his eagerness to end their separation palpable but forced to stand and stare by the sheer velocity of the carnival ride. Once again, they crash into each other and in a fit of mad love and spurred by their recent separation, decide to get married at once. Olga’s mother is dead against the union but the father acquiesces.
Post-marriage the movie takes on additional volts of tension. Verhoeven handpicks Olga’s mother as the dowager representative of all that is phony and stuck-up about society and etches her with the kind of malice usually reserved for the vilest of villains. Sporting an annoying smile that seeks only to barely conceal her own hollow nastiness, she constantly uses her influence over Olga to create rifts between the newly-weds. Even without the mother’s interference, the young lovers discover that there is lot about one another that they did not know as they crashed straight into marriage. But again, Verhoeven refuses to sink into a warp. Velocity is still at the heart of the movie and the couple gets into great raving spars only to jump on top each other at the heat of the moment. Their obsession with each other, the desire to collide is still alive, even as all else falls apart.
A decisive moment comes at a family dinner where Olga, her mom and their friends are already drunk and cracking the worst kinds of jokes when Erik arrives. This strange sequence shot in lurid red light plays surreal almost like an inebriated precursor to a most filthy orgy. The ugly decadence, the complacency, the hollow muck of the conversations, the sight of a drunk Olga caught up in the sordid merriment and later kissing a stranger, Erik’s reaction, his protest, his critique is as visceral as it gets. He literally vomits all across the table.
Decay and filth are constant metaphors throughout the film. When Erik is commissioned to create a wall engraving depicting Jesus bringing Lazarus to life, he etches maggots into Lazarus’s body saying that he’s only doing it just as it would have been. Olga is lying naked with wild flowers between her breasts when she is informed of her father’s death. She removes the flowers to reveal worms and maggots wriggling on her body which she calmly brushes away. The body decays, the body dies. These are essential truths. No loopholes around that. You may prolong the process but there is no escape. Verhoeven critiques society for coming up with convenient symbols and rituals that exist not to make grief palpable or even cathartic or even a celebration but rather to simulate mourning, relationships, grief and even after the body is dead and gone, so-called ‘respectability’. Olga’s mother poses next to her dead husbands coffin her face pulled into a frozen moment of sadness and uses the photograph as a souvenir as opposed to Erik who frequently takes his scissors to the girl’s pubic hair and pastes them lovingly in his journal.
Erik and Olga separate once again. The initial spark has indeed subsided and the world and the societies and the morals that guide it and give it a rigid hierarchy have interfered. He stills feels the love pangs love while she declares it over, perhaps under pressure and moves to America.
They meet again a few years later. Only this time a great tragedy looms over them. The body decays, the body dies. These are essential truths. Young, mad love has been replaced by a quiet melancholy. The frivolousness has been replaced by maturity and introspection. But the transition is smooth. Verhoeven refrains from pontification and overwrought melodrama and Erik’s assumption of responsibilities is not portrayed as a great sacrifice but rather, an extension of his love. It may not be young or crazy or sexy anymore, but still is love.
As much as ‘Turkish Delight’ is Verhoeven’s vision and references many of the signs, symbols and themes of his fascinating ouvre, there are other important principals whose vision is equally I portent and contributes to the funky zest and absolute greatness of the film. Frequent Verhoeven collaborator Jan de Bont shoots with a restless energy channeled straight down from the legendary Raoul Coutard. Motion and vigor occupy the heart of each frame and bright candy colors of pulp are juxtaposed with darkness and dankness of decay. There are times when all the mad energy spills over into utter confusion and times where the camera gently moves in for a beautiful fragile image. Editor Jan Bosdriesz edits with verve and punch and ties together Jan de Bont’s spirited frames into a wild primal rhythm.
As Erik, Rutger Hauer is a man possessed. If Roy Batty and Cardinal Roark are permanently etched in hallowed walls of pop culture, it is because there is a handsome, swaggering, intelligent actor beneath the mask. This is a Hauer performance I could never imagine him in. Not even his surprise poignancy in Blade Runner would convince you of his range and spontaneity he displays as Erik. But it Monique Van De Ven who stole the acting show as the complicated, free spirited, confused and ultimately doomed voluptuous beauty Olga. Her sex appeal is animal. She is a sex goddess of the kind they stopped making a long time ago. Ancient, Amazonian, Adolescent Mistress of a 1000 Dreams. And with such ease does she perform and with the burning chemistry she shares with Hauer, one might even easily overlook how courageous her turn as Olga is.
There is something Baudelaire in Turkish Delight. Something Brautigan. Dirty Beautiful Sexy Rotten Monstrous Fragile Eternal Ephemeral. Like ‘Wise men say only fool’s rush in, but I can’t help falling in love with you…….” Like “The sweet story that is older than the sea, The simple truth about the love she brings to me…”
I want your hair
to cover me with maps
of new places,
so everywhere I go
will be as beautiful
as your hair.
– Richard Brautigan, Map Shower
(Paintings Virgin Caress, Fondle, Urge Me my Love by D. Narahari, Insect Art by Mike Libby at Insect Lab Studio, Marilyn by Popartuk,The Lovers by Rene Magritte, thanks labiosdesilencio, make love not war by jazer,Cactus Mouth Informer, deviantart, Revok, Barbi, 60sfurther)
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
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Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
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Took me some time to read this completely – moving back and forth for references and secondly the language ans thots put forth…
It speaks @ love but what rules is passion. Very different both…And where is such passion, it is bound to burn both….
Just feel so…
@Arthi.. it’s pretty much like that pale blonde in Waking Life puts it.. ..when we speak in abstracts, like suppose someone says ‘love’- the wqord, the sound passes through the byzantine conduit of the listener’s mind connects with his/her memories of love past, remembered, read and voila! I’m jus saying it’s not 100%, its a state of being
Hmmm…Not quite completely but I’ve got no appropriate words now..So its ok….
i want to do that