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| Images courtesy of Nederland Film |
Years before Paul Verhoeven landed in America with Robocop,
Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Starship Troopers and Showgirls,
the Dutch provocateur’s first real international breakthrough came in the form
of Rutger Hauer’s acting debut in the 1973 erotic romantic drama Turkish
Delight. Based on the 1969 novel Turks
Fruit by Jan Wolkers which itself was adapted two more times in 2005 as a
musical and 2016 as a comic book, Paul Verhoeven’s second feature following the
failure of Business is Business became the most successful film in the
history of Dutch cinema and garnered a 1974 Academy Award nomination for Best
Foreign Language Film. Though ultimately
losing to Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night, the film immediately established
a bold actor-director working relationship between Hauer and Verhoeven and was
instrumental in ushering in the daring exploitation director’s work in the
United States a decade later.
Penned for the screen by Gerard Soeteman with some
disturbing additions that are signature Verhoeven, Turkish Delight opens
on sculptor Eric Vonk (Rutger Hauer) in his rotting disheveled studio lying
naked in bed thinking about the next random girl to take home and have sex with
before booting her out and onto the next girl.
In between waking up at night having violent nightmares about murdering
a nameless man and woman and generally causing havoc wherever he goes drifting
from one occasion to the next, the film flashes back two years to a time when
he was passionately engaged in a love relationship with a young woman named
Oleg Stapels (Monique Van De Ven).
Initially a hitchhiker, Eric is picked up by Olga for some casual sex
resulting in a road accident which both characters survive but prevents Eric
initially from seeing Olga again by her blaming parents. Undeterred, the lovers reunite much to mother’s
chagrin and they get married with Eric reluctantly incorporated into Olga’s
family unit.
Very much a happy couple unafraid to show it off to the
world including but not limited to Olga publicly wearing skimpy dresses barely
hiding her naked breasts, the dynamic duo starts hitting a rut when her father
dies but instead of taking on the family business Eric doubles down on his artistic
career by moving back to Amsterdam while Olga is forced to pick up a factory
job. Meanwhile Olga starts displaying
strange behaviors like staring into space randomly zoning out for no reason or
making impulsive decisions including but not limited to a conflict where she
makes out with a family friend at a gathering in front of everyone, prompting a
bitter breakup. Years pass and following
a divorce she weds an American for awhile until her and Eric’s paths cross once
more and it turns out she is suffering from a life-threatening brain tumor
which can’t help but completely draw the emotionally wounded and weary but
still devoted lover back into her sphere.
Gritty yet mannered, gross yet sincere, vulgar yet borne
purely out of unadorned love for another human being with all the blood, sweat,
tears, literal piss, shit and spunk brutally messily mashed together, Turkish
Delight as a piece of erotic cinematic fiction aims in Paul Verhoeven’s own
words to portray sex onscreen as ‘normal as taking a shit’. By the end of the Dutch provocateur’s
occasionally icky and dangerous romantic epic of ferocious passion, part of
ourself is inclined to agree. A snapshot
of modern love on the streets of Amsterdam, Alkmaar, Rotterdam and Zaandam in
the Netherlands, this powerful rowdy filthy dirty romance isn’t so much a wholly
sweet natured valentine as it is a sharp crotch grab ready like it or not. While all of it is in service to the text and
the soulfulness of these two very needy entwined characters, Verhoeven’s
take-no-prisoners absence of bullshit meat-and-potatoes approach all but
completely lays his personality as an auteur as bare as a rude turgid ugly
being dropped on a table.
That’s not to say this is a lovey-dovey vomitorium replete
with a scene involving a horse’s eye being discovered in the meat of a fine
cuisine followed by the rebellious Eric tapdancing his way on the kitchen
table. For all the gross messiness of
love onscreen including Eric picking up Olga’s poop from a toilet or Eric
throwing up all over everyone following a climactic scene, Turkish Delight is
handsomely lensed by his longtime cinematographer Jan De Bont (eventual director
of Speed and Twister). And
the score by recurring Verhoeven collaborator Rogier van Otterloo is soft
romantic jazz tinged with a low hum of mournful grief as though this
lip-smacking erotic affair somewhere along the way can’t possibly end
well.
Rutger Hauer, cast against the producers’ wishes in his
debut screen role, is like a hyena unafraid to get blood on his face and jaws
or rudely gracelessly stick his snout where it shouldn’t. An almost feral wild animal onscreen,
Verhoeven captured in his film a wicked energy and the birth of a major international
movie star who graciously sunk his fangs into more than a few subsequent
collaborations with the Dutch director before making his international
Hollywood debut in Nighthawks before achieving screen icon status with Blade
Runner. Hauer leaves nothing to the
imagination here and displays a fearless gusto onscreen that’s something to
behold.
Matching his energies and ferocity in her first film as an
actress is Monique Van De Ven whose screen chemistry with Hauer is palpable and
her own fearlessness almost trumps Hauer’s with twice as much onscreen nudity
and a revealing aside not seen in many if any romantic dramas where she panics
and cries following a bloody stool thinking it to be precancerous. Then we have her own gradual descent into
madness as a brain tumor starts to take hold and her hair short scalp revealing
an incision seems to forecast a cacophony of seizures and unexpected violent
outbursts, every bit of disintegration portrayed onscreen De Ven is totally
game for. While she’d make an unexpected
appearance in the show Starsky & Hutch years later as well as the Brian
Trenchard-Smith Ozploitation flick Stunt Rock, it is unquestionably her
first run in Verhoeven’s bawdy and vulgar but not sleazy or tawdry epic that remains
career defining.
A modestly sized romantic screen provocation that became the
most successful and maybe the most important Dutch film of the decade, Turkish
Delight became a critical and commercial smash in the Netherlands and
sparked the beginning of an international crossover that would land several of
its key creative players in Hollywood.
Years later after being nominated for the 1973 Academy Award for Best Foreign
Language Film, it won the Golden Calf in 1999 for Best Duch Film of the Century.
The kind of screen romance that’s rarely if
ever seen anymore with hints of the abrasiveness of Last Tango in Paris or
the stark raw passions of Damage years later, Turkish Fruit isn’t
the easiest pill for modern filmgoers to swallow. It is a love letter delivered in the form of
a shit covered middle finger or as literally shown in the movie a horse’s eye
on a spoon, a bold bawdy spit in the eye of publicly regulated decency in
service of the implacable fiery bond of romance. Most certainly the kind of bumpy provocative transgressive
ride we’ve come to know and expect from the eventual man behind Robocop. This is love, yucky stench, bloody poop stain
and all!
--Andrew Kotwicki
