Turkish Delight

Turkish Delightⁱ is an exact equivalent to Daisies, except recounted from the adolescent male perspective, rather than the adolescent female perspective. This principally means that it is an enduring, moderately optimistic, pleasant space - in stark contrast to the moonlit writhing ball of insanity and neurosis slowly collapsing inside its own inner garbage that the other one necessarily brings forth.

Of note, in no particular order : that the older woman is neatly and fairly represented as what she is : the annoying extra, spuriousⁱⁱ and aware of her spuriousness (which awareness, denied and overcompensated, is the principal driver of her annoying manner) ; that the characters that actually matter treat her with the condescendence that she properly deserves ; that the shots are taken correctly (which is to say - without any attempt to hide arbitrary parts of the human anatomy) ; that a reasonable rendition of a Euro-style party is actually presented - yes, that's what we do, tease everyone to shit, push married women to extramarital sex, good times ; the exquisite scene where a woman comes to the guy to be fucked, but brings her infant along in a pram and, when the babe starts crying during intercourse she hooks her arm agains the handle and transforms part of the primordial movement into a soothing shake that puts the already delivered baby to sleep ; and others.

Verhoeven is at the beginning of his career, which shows, to some degree in the vague sexpolitation-y air of the entire productionⁱⁱⁱ and to a much larger degree in the amusing circumstance that plenty of scenes sound a lot better read than they work in actual cinematography. Take the flowers laid on the maiden's chest that leave behind the signs of death, an otherwise delicate poetic dream, as a sole example out of the dozen+ available.

The film makes the peculiar choice of making the woman not good enough for life. This is not the normal state of things. Nevertheless - one could scarcely call himself a cultivated gentleman while being unaware of Turkish Delight.

Enjoy!

1. aka Turks fruit, 1974, by Paul Verhoeven with Monique van de Ven, Rutger Hauer. [↩]
2. The film is notable for containing the apoteotic scene of menopausal irrelevance, whereby the man is fucking the woman and the old bitty walks in, gets all aggitated to apoplectic levels, eventually resolves to stop the act through banging her ineffectual fists atop the man's ass to heavy comedic effect. [↩]
3. It's quite clear filmed in the places, by the people that did the pronos - with an o! Then again this may not be a problem of skill as much as absence of resources. [↩]