Tag: turkey

The Yard: seasons 1 + 2

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★★★½
“Have you ever been in a Turkish prison?”

I really must get round to reviewing Wentworth. The Australian women-in-prison drama certainly deserves coverage here, and has provided some of the best television we’ve enjoyed in the 2010’s. I keep intending to do so, but suspect that will now likely have to wait until after the show comes to a conclusion, following its ninth and final season in 2021. In the meantime, however, I do get to review the Turkish remake of the show. If you’ve seen Wentworth, this version is perhaps as unnecessary as any Hollywood remake of a familiar foreign film. Yet there are enough differences – both in story and culture – that I didn’t mind too much.

The central character is Deniz Demir, a married woman whose husband is shot in murky circumstances, and is sent to prison while the investigation proceeds. There, she falls in with one of the jail’s two “queen bees”, long-term inmate Azra Kaya (Moray). Azra is engaged in a power struggle with her rival, Kudret Ozturk (Kose), the matriarch of a criminal family on the outside. Initially, Deniz is simply trying to keep her nose clean and her head down, while waiting for resolution to her case. However, it’s never as simple as that, and she soon finds herself in deep trouble, especially after being found standing over the corpse of the facility’s warden, holding the apparent murder weapon. Meanwhile, things on the outside are equally troublesome, as Deniz’s teenage daughter, Ecem (Akar) has started a relationship with Alp – who just happens to be the son of Kudret.

When compared to Wentworth, there are some interesting differences, both in content and style. The melodrama here is definitely cranked up several notches: after one tragic moment, it feels like Deniz spends the next six episodes weeping in her cell. However, what you won’t see here is any lesbian canoodling, or even insinuations of such things, I imagine in deference to the still fairly religious nature of Turkey. What this version does, and particularly well, is use music as background to the drama as it plays out. This begins with the domestic clash which opens proceedings, and draws out of a broad tonal range, from 17th-century classical (Henry Purcell’s Dido’s Lament gets used to great effect in the final episode) through to Turkish contemporary pop songs.

I read that, apparently, it aired in Turkey in 2½ hour chunks. Netflix has, wisely, cut these up into 45-minute episodes. It also managed to ruffle the feathers of some authorities, who proclaimed – before it was shown, naturally – that the show would “Feed into public perceptions that prisons impose torture [on inmates]… The promotion of such perceptions of prisons serve the purposes of some terror organizations.” I wouldn’t say it was as good as that… But it’s certainly not bad at all, and if I weren’t aware of its inspiration, this could well be looking at a seal of approval. As is, I do have to ding it slightly for familiarity, and would still point you in the direction of the original instead.

Dir: Yüksel Aksu, Hülya Gezer and Safak Bal 
Star: Demet Evgar, Ceren Moray, Nursel Kose, Eslem Akar
a.k.a. Avlu

The Angel of Vengeance: The Female Hamlet

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★★★
“To be or not to be… NOT to be…”

Okay, the above is shamelessly lifted from The Last Action Hero, in which there’s a spoof trailer for Arnold Schwarzenegger as Hamlet. But it applies just as much to this, which is remarkably progressive considering its origins; 1977 Turkey was not exactly in the forefront of women’s liberation. Yet here we are, with a modernized and severely truncated version of Shakespeare’s story. This runs 86 minutes, compared to 242 minutes for, say, Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet. But it hits the main spots, even if only in passing: for instance, Hamlet’s soliloquy shows up, though “Alas, poor Yorick” gets short shrift.

In case you’d forgotten: Hamlet (Girik) returns home from drama school in America, after the cold-blooded assassination of her father by her uncle (Yurdakul), who has married Hamlet’s mother (Ferdag). After seeing her father’s ghost, Hamlet decides to feign insanity, in order to get to the truth. When she stages a play, The Murder of Gonzago, depicting what she believes to be the true events, and her uncle’s rapid, guilty exit, it’s time for Hamlet to take her bloody revenge, and consign her uncle to the same end to which he sent her father.

It all takes place against a strange soundtrack, which includes both Shostakovich’s score to the 1964 version of Hamlet made in Russia (officially sanctioned or not), and Silver Convention’s disco hit from a couple of years earlier, Fly Robin Fly. It has its share of surreal or even avant-garde imagery too, particularly when Hamlet is playing at being mad, such as conducting an imaginary orchestra – the instruments are there, just not anyone to play them – in the middle of a field. The play, meanwhile, comes over as a bizarre cross between A Clockwork Orange, Manos, Hands of Fate and an early Kate Bush video.

The above makes it sounds rather less interesting than it is, even for someone like me, whose knowledge of Shakespeare is fairly limited. The main thing which it has working in its favor, is Girik, who was the veteran of literally hundreds of Turkish films in the sixties and seventies, before becoming the mayor of a district in Istanbul towards the end of the eighties. Even when the acting required here is nothing more than pulling faces (as quite often), she has sufficient charisma and delivers her (frequently ludicrous) lines with enough intensity to sustain the viewer’s interest.

The other tweaks resulting from the gender reversal have their moments too. For instance, Ophelia’s descent into madness takes on a rather different tone when she’s no longer a loony young girl. The same goes for Hamlet’s relationship with Rezzan and Gul, the female versions of Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, which feels something akin to a Turkish version of Sex and the City. In the end, I’m probably glad Erksan – best known in the West for Seytan, his knock-off of The Exorcist – opted for a brisk adaptation of the bard. While decent at its length, I strongly suspect that 242 minutes of this approach would have seemed considerably less rather than more.

Dir: Metin Erksan
Star: Fatma Girik, Sevda Ferdag, Reha Yurdakul, Orçun Sonat
a.k.a. Intikam Melegi/Kadin Hamlet

Gang of Women (Essabet el Nissae)

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★½
“Turkish not-such-a-delight”

gangofwomen2Having enjoyed (albeit in a loose definition of the term, admittedly) Karate Girl, I figured I’d dip my toe again in to the world of the middle Eastern action heroine, with this promising-looking poster, which came out the year before. It may be Turkish. It may be Lebanese. It doesn’t matter much. Because it’s largely disappointing as a GWG film, though you probably haven’t seen anything like this before. Unless, that is, your normal viewing combines slapstick comedy, manic overacting and musical numbers that appear to have strayed in from a Quaalude-overdosed Bollywood film. The main point of interest is probably that there was a time when Beirut was less a war zone than the Monte Carlo of the Eastern Mediterranean.

The story, such as it is, focuses on Murad (Arkin, who could be played by Bruce Campbell if anyone ever does a Hollywood remake), a journalist under pressure from his editor to get some more exciting stories. Along with his fraidy-cat photographer, Fouad (Yasin), he visits a supposedly haunted house and they get a picture of an apparent spectral apparition. However, it turns out the house is actually the lair of an all-woman group of counterfeiters, whose cover is as nightclub entertainers, and the photo is now potentially incriminating evidence against them. Their boss sends a stream of minionettes to retrieve the picture and ensure they don’t get exposed, but Murad is also falling for Seham (Sabah), one of the singers for the group. Is she what she seems? And what of the mysterious, unseen “lady” who is in charge of the crime gang? Before all is revealed, there will be laughter, PG-13 rated stripteases, a cat-fight, pauses for the heroine to burst into song, and manly fisticuffs.

gangofwomenI will confess that I enjoyed this a little more than the 1.5 star rating above, which is based more on expectations and genre interest. I was looking for some sleek Eurospy nonsense, not comedy which would be rejected by the Carry on crew as unnecessarily broad. In the right mindset – which would have to be fairly undemanding – this could be entertaining nonsense, and as noted, is so “not Hollywood,” it should certainly have novelty value. I’ll admit, I did laugh when Fouad and Murad dressed up as women, to enter a health club for a rendezvous with one of the gang, simply because it’s so ludicrous: Arkin is the least-convincing lady you’ll ever see.

But it’s incredibly dated and localized, with aspects that would shame a local amateur dramatic society. Witness, for example, the cameo by Farid Shawki, an icon of Arabic cinema. He’s introduced by someone saying, “It’s OK, it’s Mr. Farid Shawki,” which is about as clunky as imaginable, and also patronizes the audience by thinking you have to tell them [it’d be like having Clint Eastwood in a Hollywood film, and introducing him with, “It’s OK, it’s Mr. Clint Eastwood”]  The musical numbers largely consist of Sabah lip-syncing while standing as still as a deer caught in headlights, which is about as enthralling as it sounds, and even for its time, what passes for the action sequences appear to have been made up on the spot, with whatever happened on the first take, making the final cut. Nice scenery (of the geographical as well as human kinds) can only take you so far.

Dir: Farouk Agrama
Star:  Cuneyt Arkin, Sabah, Ismail Yasin, Mayada

Karate Girl (1974)

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★★★
“Definitely not to be confused with the Rina Takeda film of the same name.”

This movie acquired some notoriety last year when a clip of a villain’s death went viral as “Worst death scene ever”, even though it had been edited and had extra audio added for “humourous” effect. Certainly, there’s plenty to mock in this 1974 Turkish revenge flick, which plays like someone heard second-hand descriptions of Thriller: A Cruel Picture and decided the world needed a PG remake. However, while aspects of the execution are without a question shoddy and laughable, it has an interesting story, briskly told, and with a good central character.

That heroine is Zeynep (Akin), a mute flower-seller who roams the streets of Istanbul with an apparently endless selection of cue cards through which she converses with customers. Her happy life is disrupted when five escaped convicts invade the home where she lives with her father, killing him and pawing her about, before stealing the money they have saved for a medical operation to return her speech. However, the trauma apparently had the same effect, Zeynep now being able to talk. She vows to track down those responsible and make them pay, with the help of a convenient passing transient, Murat (Hun, who’d go on to become an member of the Turkish parliament), who happens to be well skilled in shooting and martial arts, for reasons that do actually make sense eventually. Zeynap ends up joining the local police force to further her mission, which climaxes on a roof-top where the last member takes a baby hostage.

Apparently unreleased in the US or UK, this is available from the usual dubious sources, most commonly on a print dubbed into English, with French credits and Greek subtitles. Oddly, this adds to the whole package, which succeeds in being more entertaining than you’d expect, in a way best described as “barking mad.” Akin, who was one of the leading lights of Turkish cinema in the sixties and seventies, gives it her all, and certainly has the screen presence to pull it off, even allowing for some of the worst stunt doubling in cinema history – the wig used by her double is a completely different colour. The film manages to be both chaste and sleazy at the same time, with the latter best represented by the bad guys’ facial hair. No-one will ever mistake this for any kind of classic. However, I’ve been less entertained by many movies, and it’s enjoyable enough, for various reasons, that I found it relatively easy to overlook the undeniable flaws.

Dir: Orhan Aksoy
Star: Filiz Akin, Ediz Hun