Turkish Delight – a love story with a difference – starts brutal, shifts to crude and then cruises along as consistently outrageous. It’s the story of Erik (Rutger Hauer), a Dutch sculptor who occasionally manages to sell his work, despite his low regard for stuffed shirts, social climbers and those who dare to come between him and Olga (Monique van de Ven). She is a free spirit, daughter of furniture storeowners, who is taken by the unrefined charms of Erik. Hauer infuses Erik with an uncouth, seemingly callous intensity. He’s a dangerous fellow. Van de Ven is equally effective as the free-spirited Olga.
The film explores their relationship and what follows its tragic end. It is constructed discontinuously, with several flashbacks and flash-forwards that might give some audience members difficulty, but which establishes a very clear – and not particularly sympathetic – picture of Erik from the start.
Erik’s only way of expressing love is through sex, and while Olga appears to be happy with this, it eventually leads to his downfall. Erik does show a few tender moments, but for the most part, he’s a walking, talking recipe for offending bourgeois sensibilities. His stifling jealousy is a major issue, although it isn’t explored satisfactorily; one moment he and Olga are prancing about like carefree lovers, and the next she’s denouncing him. Jealousy seems like a non-issue until it becomes everything. As a result, the eventual conflict between Erik and Olga makes no sense.
Apart from the less than successful love story, there are moments of wonderfully black humour and no shortage of iconoclastic nuttiness, as Erik and Olga show up prudes and hypocrites. Scene after scene opens with a shocking image – often something that turns what came immediately before right on its head. When the social commentary is in play, it works marvellously. Unfortunately, the love story is realized much less successfully.
The movie is sexually explicit and often quite crude as director Paul Verhoeven clearly intends to take a poke at audience members who are as prudish as Erik’s many antagonists. In this effort, he succeeds brilliantly; it’s a searing social commentary. It would have been much more powerful if only Verhoeven gave us more insight into what makes Erik so anti-social. It just isn’t good enough to expect us to accept that he’s that way simply because he’s an independent-minded artist.
Is it enough for this shocking and ultimately tragic portrait of a man on the fringe of civil society to challenge and disturb us? Doesn’t it need to dig deeper and let us in on what has made him so terribly tormented? The film doesn’t hesitate to display maggots, genitalia, vomit and other shocking images, but after a while all this does is reinforce what we already know – Erik is angry; Erik is crude; Erik just likes to have sex. Unfortunately it’s not enough and Turkish Delight does need to dig deeper. In this regard, the film fails. Turkish Delight – like Erik – is powerful but lacks a clear sense of meaning.
