Film Review: Turkish Delight (Turks fruit, 1973)

The Netherlands has built a reputation as Europe’s most tolerant and permissive country. This reputation found a way to reflect itself in Dutch cinema or, to be more precise, Dutch society’s high tolerance of films and film‑makers which would be deemed transgressive anywhere else. Probably the best example can be found in a film which proved to be the commercially most successful Dutch film of all time and later became honoured by a Dutch postage stamp. However, outside the Netherlands’ borders the fate of Turkish Delight , the 1973 drama directed by Paul Verhoeven, was quite different. Despite being recognised as a film good enough for a 1974 Foreign Language Oscar nomination, in the USA it was branded with an “X” censorship rating by the MPAA, while the Cannes Film Festival refused to show it because it was deemed “pornographic”.

The film, based on the eponymous best‑selling novel by Jan Wolkers, begins with a series of vignettes featuring the protagonist, a young sculptor named Eric Vonk played by Rutger Hauer . He seduces various women and has sex with them, but his romantic conquests do little to fill the emptiness he feels inside. A flashback brings the plot two years earlier and begins to explain the source of such emptiness. Eric one day hitches a ride from Olga Stapels played by Monique van de Ven , a shopkeeper’s daughter. The two of them instantly feel an irresistible attraction to each other and begin a relationship that becomes so passionate and strong that even Olga’s bourgeois parents ultimately reconcile with their daughter’s bohemian artist boyfriend. Eric and Olga ultimately marry, but their idyll begins to shatter due to Olga’s inexplicably eccentric behaviour, which culminates in her leaving Er…

It could be argued that Turkish Delight is a product of its times, made when the ground was still shaking following the great social turmoil of the 1960s. The two young protagonists enthusiastically embrace the worldview and attitudes of their generation. In the film they never miss an opportunity to challenge the old order, either through irreverence, an anti‑establishment lifestyle, or actions that are contrary not only to the sexual morals of the older generations, but also to common sense. An interesting twist in Turkish Delight is the script, which reconciles this iconoclastic worldview with a plot more suitable for a conventional Hollywood melodrama. That led many contemporary critics to compare it with Love Story , an immensely popular Hollywood film made three years earlier which is now, unlike Turkish Delight , mostly forgotten.

The reason why Turkish Delight remains so effective almost half a century later could be found in the very fortunate collection of talents gathered for it. The most important is Paul Verhoeven who, as director, showed incredible skill in shocking the audience, not only through explicit sexual content or male frontal nudity, but also through a naturalistic use of various bodily fluids that would remain taboo in Hollywood until the late‑1990s gross‑out comedies. His cinematographer Jan de Bont, who would later, just like Verhoeven, continue a successful career in Hollywood, contributes to the film by adding realism through the use of natural lighting and a constantly moving camera. A great asset is Rutger Hauer, who, in his prime, plays a character who can evoke sympathy despite some actions that can be, especially by today’s standards, viewed as reprehensible. An impressive performance i…

After watching this film, it is quite understandable why those talents with the possible exception of van de Ven made such successful careers in international cinema. Some viewers, on the other hand, might not like the film’s irreverent and over‑naturalistic style, and many might not like some of the content which is as shocking today as it was half a century ago.^1^ On the other hand, those viewers who are more tolerant and open‑minded will probably appreciate Turkish Delight .

RATING: 7/10 ++

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