WHAT A PAIR

I LOVED A TURK (BİR TÜRKE GÖNÜL VERDİM), 1969
Turkiye | Betacam, B&W, 100’ | Turkish
Director: Halit Refiğ
Cast: Eva Bender, Ahmet Mekin, Bilal İnci, Osman Alyanak, Seden Kızıltunç, Aynur Akarsu

HAMAM, 1996
Turkiye, Spain, Italy | HDD, Colour, 94’ | Turkish
Director: Ferzan Özpetek
Cast: Alessandro Gassman, Francesca D’Aloja, Carlo Cecchi, Şerif Sezer, Halil Ergün, Mehmet Günsur

Soothing and seductive as the taste of Baklava, soaking and sedating as the vapours of the Turkish Bath: Those who indulge in these pleasures will soon be overcome, or even dead. That seems to be the underlying message of both I Loved A Turk and Hamam, the latter being shot almost 30 years after the former. In both of them, the heroine/hero falls in love with a whole country rather than an individual, even though personal relationships strengthen their love affairs. As the cinematographers of both films show by extended long shots, the country is Turkey with its mixture of oriental and occidental culture, its abundance of antique heritage and monuments witnessing the rise and fall of empires, its lavishing hospitality, and its laid-back sense of time –everything the pragmatic but receptive Westerner has been longing for all his or her life. And it is Turkey with its difficult language, its strange religious rites, its patriarchal social order, and its opaque scheming – everything the anxious and unconfident Westerner has always been afraid of.
Directors Halit Refiğ and Ferzan Özpetek have both been living abroad and have experienced the clash between cultures they are talking about in their films. It seems they are emphasising the incongruousness rather than the mutual attraction. In I Loved A Turk, a young German woman goes to Kayseri to meet her son’s father İsmail, a former gastarbeiter in Germany, and is rejected by him – only to meet her true love Mustafa and his family who charm her even into converting to Islam. Mustafa must pay for his unconventional choice, though: The jealous gastarbeiter shoots him to death even before the wedding night. In Hamam an Italian interior designer undergoes a similar process in Istanbul, apart from converting to homosexuality instead of Islam which he doesn’t survive, either. He is getting stabbed by a gangster hired by a female (!) investor whose plans he balked.
So there seems to be only one recommendation for all Turkey friends and lovers: Don’t violate written or even unwritten rules which is, of course, difficult. But then again just a matter of empathy and courteousness. -Daniela Sannwald