EASTERN CINEMA: ON THE EDGE OF THE PERMISSIBLE

Shiite terrorists also become the driving force behind the plot of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, 1988), a comedy that firmly placed Almodóvar in the pantheon of the world’s top directors. One of the main characters, having fallen in love with a Shiite man, turns her apartment into a den for terrorists and all their stuff. She doesn't realize who they are until she sees a photo of her tenants on TV—they and all their accomplices are wanted by the authorities. Her attempts to evade justice, interspersed with suicide attempts, form one of the nerves in the film's multi-layered composition, all the threads of which lead to the grand finale at the airport, where the Shiites are preparing to blow up a flight from Madrid to Stockholm.

These are the well-known facts that lie on the surface. But there is something that even Almodóvar's most ardent fans do not know: that this and the director's subsequent comedy, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (¡Átame!, 1989), were inspired by the imagery, plot, and even narrative structure of Iranian cinema. The director has consistently and willingly talked about the influence of Hollywood and French cinema because these films are popular all over the world. But in his interviews and confessions, he avoided boring the public with references to obscure facts. Even his passion for Sara Montiel’s homegrown musical melodramas, so obvious to fans of Spanish cinema, was not advertised by him until 2004, when he simply included an entire sequence from her film This Woman (Esa mujer, 1969) in his film Bad Education (La mala educación, 2004). In this, the adolescent character was largely shaped by films starring the Spanish diva. Twenty years ago, his muse and friend, the actress Penélope Cruz, said in an interview that by the time they were meeting for a cup of coffee at noon, Pedro had usually already managed to attend three film screenings and was happily telling her about cinema from countries she did not even suspect had a film industry, such as Bangladesh.

The Iranian movie that split Almodóvar's filmography between Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Women) and Tie Me Up is called Fellow Traveler (Hamsafar), released in 1974. Today, I like to show this film to people and observe their reactions. Even with close friends, even if they are over fifty years old—and especially if they are!—if they love Almodóvar, the reaction is the same. For at least half the movie, until they get used to it, they wipe their glasses, if they wear them, they stare, they exhale and say, ‘No, this can't be Iran.’ Only the opening credits, the off-screen song in Farsi, the Iranian names, and the undeniable symbols of Tehran's architecture—like the Azadi Tower—in the frame convince them to accept the truth. Iran’s forty-four-year theocracy accustomed foreigners to see it as a country of women in headscarves and restrained men, a country without alcohol and other poisons.

However, this is what happens on screen in Fellow Traveler. In one scene, after three elderly men persistently ring the doorbell of an apartment, the door is opened by a sleepy girl in a tiny bra and panties. Not a bit embarrassed, she turns her back on them and scoots back into bed, muttering on the way, ‘I mean, can you imagine, he doesn’t let people have a nap: he's been calling all morning, now he's brought some idiots.’ As the girl falls headlong into her pillow, a guy whose only clothes are underpants as tiny as the girl's comes out from under her blanket. And when one of the old men lifts the blanket over the girl with his cane, she yells, ‘Are you crazy?!’ and pulls it back down. Later, the guy in the underpants, whose name is Ali, after putting on his jeans and shirt, knocks over one glass of rum after another at the bar, while a sympathetic and heavily made-up aunt takes a drag on her cigarette and says she can't help him because she's been keeping a low profile since she was busted because of marijuana. In another scene, another girl, Atefeh, a daughter of the old man with a cane, accepts a glass of whiskey as a token of her fiancé's attention, and soon after barely escapes becoming the object of group sex and pornography—because that's what entertainment means on the Caspian coast. For the rest of the film, Atefeh and Ali, who have never met, cross Iran on a motorcycle, sleeping side by side in roadside motels.

It is important to emphasize that we are talking only about good characters (except perhaps the initiators of the pornography stunt, and even they are merrymakers rather than villains). Wouldn’t the unbelievably deceitful and frivolous cast, with their glib speech and communication without excessive pleasantries, and the whole emotional structure of the picture, where plebeian laughter overlaps with unrestrained romance, be enough to call Fellow Traveler an Iranian rehearsal for Almodóvar? But wait. The film is full of specific instances that are also present in the Spaniard's two major comedies. Its central plot splits in two with Almodóvar. In Fellow Traveler, Atefeh is a pregnant young woman, and her latest suitor and fiancé is hiding from her while she tries to chase him all over Iran (the Pepa and Iván line from Women), while the housebreaker Ali, hired by her father, tries to bring her home for a promised fee. He literally ties Atefeh, who is stoned on painkillers, alcohol, and drugs throughout the film, to himself and his motorcycle and keeps her tied up until she falls in love with him (Banderas and Abril in Tie Me Up!).

Some scenes are blatant quotations. In Women, when Pepa goes to see the feminist lawyer Paulina Morales seeking help for her friend (who got involved with the Shiites), she rummages through her purse for cigarettes. Instead, she takes out her friend’s sneaker, and with a nonchalant look puts it on the lawyer's desk and says: ‘And this is her shoe.’ In Fellow Traveler, the pregnant Atefeh in a wedding dress and veil rams a jeep into the gates of the factory where her fiancé works, breaks her heel in the corridor on the way to his office, and bursts into the meeting shouting, ‘You bastard, you must marry me!’ And as if to validate her words in front of the staff, she slams the ruined shoe on his desk with a loud bang.

Structurally, the first third of Women is exactly like the first third of Fellow Traveler: it is as if we are seeing fragments of the lives of unrelated people, and their stories break into the narrative at the moment when passions are heated to the limit. Atefeh in Fellow Traveler drives a jeep through Tehran in a wedding veil, yelling ‘Watch out!’ to other drivers. Pepa in Women sets fire to the bed and faints. At the same time, in Tie Me Up! Almodóvar borrowed the structure of the second half of the film. When all the subplots are cut away and all those who brought the characters together leave the scene, only the two tied-up ones are left. At this point, a lively song is introduced, which functions as an elevator, raising the emotional quality of the film from the comic plane to a romantic one. Finally, as in Women, the grand finale of Fellow Traveler takes place at the airport, before the flight of the character who so desperately needed to be stopped.

Atefeh and Ali are played by two of the central figures of Iranian pop culture in the 1970s, Googoosh and Behrouz Vossoughi. Googoosh was what was then called a universal artist, equal parts movie star and pop star, and sometimes masterfully combining both talents in musical films or TV dramas. At that time, the world was rich in such artists—Barbra Streisand, Monica Vitti, Lyudmila Gurchenko, Rosa Rymbaeva, Raffaella Carrà, and Alla Pugacheva all starred in films, acquitting themselves quite decently too. But to call Googoosh something like an ‘Iranian Liza Minnelli’ would simply be wrong. Googoosh is something of a hurricane, with a voice of irresistible power and crushing passion, capable of spanning a full octave of emotion, from despair to jubilation, capable of shattering all hope and being comforting at the same time. The reason her songwriting legacy is so vibrant to this day is that her arrangers have found an entirely convincing way to squeeze the twisted harmonies of melodies based on Iranian musical traditions into funk orchestrations laden with instruments and hot rhythmic ornaments.

In her movies, Googoosh created the image of an explosive woman capable of desperate acts as in Fellow Traveler. But throughout her decade on screen, she managed to control the power of that explosion, ranging from the breezy whims of a rich heiress biting her lip at the manly figure of a doomed man (The Window (Panjereh), 1970) to the steady volcanic eruption of a universal diva like herself, who climbed to Olympus, drove her own cars, yachts, and life itself, who was bent on spectacular and total self-destruction through exhaustion (Along the Night (Dar Emtedad-e Shab), 1977). In this last film, her character is a Sunday mother who has sacrificed her young daughter to avoid being with her husband, with whom she has fallen out of love. She spends her nights in a trendy club, where she dances to disco music and even does a dance that is very reminiscent of what would be called breakdancing in the future. Then she gets stoned with her suitor, a rich old man, lies in bed during the day, snaps at calls and offers from writers and producers, and rejects the advances of a respectable composer who offers her a first-class repertoire in favor of a harassing schoolboy who prefers to get drunk rather than pass exams.

Such a heroine was to be—and indeed was!—the result of almost half a century of Iranian show business, since Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi proclaimed a course of westernization and urbanization for Iran, turning it into an exclusively secular state. The emancipation of women was part of this program; even on Wikipedia, you can find a picture of the Shah lighting a cigarette for his second wife, Soraya, who is wearing a dress with short sleeves that barely covered her shoulders. And, of course, it was this part of the reforms, embodied in the image of Googoosh, that was the sticking point for Shiites. But the Iranians of the 1970s did not care, just as they were unlikely to project onto themselves the eccentric tantrums of Googoosh's screen heroines, who, after a night of love, set fire to museum paintings for warmth, like the characters in The Thomas Crown Affair. They were concerned about her hair. From Cannes, where Googoosh was awarded a gold disc in 1971 as the world's best pop performer at the traditional MIDEM record expo, she returned with the shockingly new short Sassoon haircut. Tehran's fashionistas soon flocked to salons to get a ‘Googoosh’ haircut.

Googoosh's partner in Fellow Traveler, Behrouz Vossoughi, also introduced a haircut for men, but it was not named after him. When men came to the barbershop expecting to leave with a lion's mane like Vossoughi's, they would order a ‘Caesar’ haircut’. This was the name of the character, in the 1969 film of the same name (Gheisar), that had catapulted Vossoughi from being a merely famous actor to the undisputed idol of the local youth. Directed by Masoud Kimiai, this black-and-white film—even though Iranian cinema had long mastered not only color but also widescreen cinema—became the first example of ‘lowlife cinema’, which had the same function in Iran as the New Wave in France.The arson attack on the Rex Cinema in Abadan, which was screening Kimiai's film The Deer (Gavaznha, 1974), starring Vossoughi—about a heroin addict who shelters a wounded school friend who is being hunted by the police after an otherwise successful bank robbery—set off the riots of 19 August 1978, which would finally boil over into the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Along the way, 180 of Iran's then 400 movie theaters were destroyed: the Ayatollah's supporters saw the Shah's Westernization of Iran as the main danger to the country, and the ‘lowlife’ movies, with their half-dressed heroes and heroines, night life, rivers of alcohol, drugs, hysteria, agitated violence, and equally agitated desperate pop songs, became a bugaboo for the Islamists.

Just as Googoosh's heroine in Along the Night destroyed herself with her own songs and roles, Kimiai and Vossoughi created a cinema that nourished protest sentiments. At first, they were busy destroying the possibility of showing this cinema, and after the revolution, even the possibility of making it. Vossoughi's on-screen alter ego differed from Googoosh primarily in that he bore the mark of social disadvantage. When they played as a duo—and after Fellow Traveler the two were even married, albeit briefly—Vossoughi acted in one way or another as a sociopath who wanted to cross the line of inequality. In Fellow Traveler, this theme is given a comic twist and resolved into a romantic gesture. In the depths of the lowlife New Wave—and the film, also in black and white, is an integral part of it—this funny and hopeful film indeed occupies the same place as Almodóvar in the system of festival cinema. As a rule, the doom of Vossoughi's scheme is revealed at the level of esthetics, the mood of the frame, without the necessity of any inevitable misfortunes of the finale. In The Window, a remake of the American A Place in the Sun (1951), which was, in turn, inspired by Theodor Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy, the realistic texture of the film is interrupted in the middle by a ten-minute section portraying a wordless, idyllic ménage à trois between Vossoughi's hero with his rich cousin and his bride (Googoosh). Bicycle rides, ball games, swaying treetops, and three young people for whom freshness is what counts now, while social inequality is of no concern. They rub suntan oil on each other—this bit is borrowed from Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1961), and for connoisseurs of the French New Wave, this quotation does not bode well.

The French New Wave comes up in conversations about Vossoughi for a reason: Kimiai, his Pygmalion, has been actively using the favorite angles of the Wave ever since their first experience—Gheisar—together. He shoots Tehran through Godard's lens, zooming from the rooftops to the streets where the heroes wander, like the Champs-Élysées in Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960), as if with his head tilted back, looking at the bare, wet branches of the trees leaning on both sides through the windshield of a moving car, like the boulevards in My Life to Live (Vivre sa vie, 1962).

Gheisar is a straightforward story of a blood feud, like Le Samuraï with Alain Delon. Vossoughi catches up with his first victim in a bathhouse: the shower stall is filmed from above, Vossoughi presses his strong, naked body against his enemy from behind, shoves his palm into his mouth, which looks like the scuffle between Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Ken Russell's Women in Love released a year later. Another sexually ambivalent image with Vossoughi, which would be surprisingly soon repeated in an Oscar-winning film, is found in The Window, when the hero first arrives at his rich cousin's pool party, and the cousin escorts him to his bedroom for him to try the clothes in his wardrobe. It is a virtual copy of a scene from Cabaret (1972) with Michael York and Helmut Griem's blue sweater. As a result of this fitting, Vossoughi will acquire a wool lurex shirt and a white fitted club shirt with two vertical patterns of touchingly tiny wildflowers running down the body. It was ‘invented’ and put on the market by Roberto Cavalli twenty years ago, thirty years after the release of The Window.

As for the shower brawl in Gheisar, it would end with the jerky movement of a razor and a close-up of a bloody palm print on a tiled wall, an image that would be replicated in the US in the second half of the 1970s by Brian De Palma and John Carpenter, directors who elevated the horror film to the level of high art. But even De Palma's cinephilia was anticipated by Kimiai: as early as in Reza, the Motorcyclist (Reza Motori, 1970), Vossoughi, whose hero, depending on the customer, delivers boxes of film or bags of drugs on his motorcycle, leaves his own bloody palm print on the faded screen. Reza borrows lines from Delon and Bond and comes up with a heist worthy of Melville. He knows that a famous writer who looks like him is writing a book about madness and is planning to visit the asylum for inspiration. Reza pretends to have schizophrenia with elements of megalomania, becomes a patient in the hospital, and when the writer comes to visit, locks him up in his place for the night of the robbery—from the staff's point of view, it is quite reasonable that the schizophrenic screams that he is a famous writer—thus, providing himself with an alibi that the staff of the entire asylum will confirm. But la vie n'est pas du cinema (life is not cinema), as Mireille Mathieu sang when Reza, the Motorcyclist was released, and Reza would leave his blood on the screen that taught him to see life as an adventure as an indelible reproach to the world of cinema.

In Beehive (Kandoo, 1975), shot in color, with the vibrant hues of the emphatically semi-amateur filmmaking that made Cassavetes's Husbands (1970) so recognizably alive, Vossoughi, with the help of another director, Fereydun Gole, breaks many taboos that Western cinema still hardly dares approach. In one scene, he reaches through a partition to a friend for a condom while each is pleasuring his own girl, and then, after voluntarily accepting a bet to get drunk in seven bars without paying, he spends the rest of the film in wet pants and with a black eye. In this lack of squeamishness about the character, the highest form of Vossoughi's friendliness is revealed, for it is only and precisely the friend we care about, even when—and especially when!—he has lost all and any ability to care for himself.

Breaking out of the circle of garbage for Iranian youth in the 1970s was not an option. I once asked Hengameh Panahi—director of Celluloid Dreams, a company that distributes films by Takeshi Kitano, François Ozon, and Alexander Sokurov, who left Iran with her parents at the age of twelve—if, according to the films, the world was such a joyful disco under the shah, why did anyone need a revolution? She told me: ‘The disco was only in the palace and a few houses in each neighborhood. People were digging through garbage dumps in search of food.’ All benefits were used to entertain the shah's family and cronies, and if something was against the law, the shah rewrote the constitution. Social powerlessness was compounded by disenfranchisement.

In 1978, as we have already discussed, Iran's movie theaters would go up in flames, but not before the highest grossing film in the country's history had rolled through them in 1977: Along the Night starring Googoosh. If Gheisar foreshadowed one of Cabaret's iconic scenes, Along the Night makes full use of its lexicon. There are the backlit shots of Googoosh from behind on stage, in natural light, invented by the great cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond for the musical with Liza Minnelli. There's the viewfinder layered with Vaseline, thanks to which the scenes in the dressing room are washed in a hazy light that emanates from the lamps around the mirrors in the frame, seeming like carbon monoxide. There's also an exact replica of the scene in which the disgruntled Minnelli returns home and immediately gets behind the bar to make a prairie oyster. In this replica, despite the different era, Googoosh even wears the same bowler hat and low-waisted dress. Only director Parviz Sayyad was not so straightforward: he had just transferred Anton Chekhov's humorous 1883 sketch From the Diary of a Young Girl (Dead End (Bon Bast), 1977), with its ‘we are all under surveillance’ atmosphere, to contemporary Iranian reality.

The entire scene turned out to be a reflection in a giant mirror that was carried away by workers along with the film frame, revealing the orphaned apartment. Googoosh's character was leaving for Paris indefinitely, taking with her her amorous schoolboy, who liked to drink straight from the bottle and chuckle that it went down well in the early hours, planning to then jump around on the hoods of cars, accompanied by the hopeful whistle of morning birds. According to a friend of mine, all the girls in Azerbaijan were madly in love with the young actor Said Kengerani, who spent half the film half-naked and, with Googoosh, participated in scenes no less risky than the infamous love scene from Claude Lelouch's A Man and a Woman (Un homme et une femme, 1966).

However, the millionaire antics of a diva and a schoolboy not only broke the hearts of everyone around them but also drove a neighbor in love with the boy to suicide. The schoolboy would die in the plane on Googoosh's lap, and in the final shot, she would raise the armchair against the camera's peephole, plunging the screen into darkness and Iran's secular cinema into ‘The End’.

‘The darkness became darker than the black night; I resigned myself to the torment of my heart. Joy turned away from me. Toward death I walked the common path. I left the morning garden without lifting my eyes from the earth; my life became a pilgrimage to death, and the thought of death was my joy,’ —fittingly, these are the lyrics of the song (Marham (Balm)) sung by Googoosh against the opening credits.

‘Love, I beseech you, rise! The trace of a fallen star is fading… There is nothing sadder than a song when there is no hope in the soul. I stretch out my hands to you, but a star is rolling down from the sky—there is nothing worse than separation, when separation is forever.’ These are the words of a song (Sen de benim kadar gerçekleri görüyorsun (You know the truth as well as I do)) sung two years later by another pop star of the East who was then on the rise, the future mainstay and still unsurpassed diva of Turkey, if not the Balkans (her performances with Goran Bregović's orchestra are unforgettable), Sezen Aksu. The song, just like Googoosh's, is full of the same suicidal despair, the same misery in the face of the inevitable. One year later, there would be a military coup in Turkey that would turn the country into a police state for several years. The 1970s, at the end of which the coup happened, was a time of political chaos—there were eleven changes of governments within a decade—and social malaise coupled with total acquiescence in moral issues. Hollywood, Italian giallo (the genre of stylish, violent crime thrillers), and sex films flooded the screens, and Turkey, which produced up to 200 films a year, did not want to be left behind. If Iran anticipated, inspired, and taught film lessons to Western masters, Turkey mercilessly copied them, sometimes amusingly, sometimes with some success, managing to insert something of its own gained through suffering into a hackneyed plot.

It is no wonder, then, that The Little Sparrow (or Farewell Love Song as Minik Serçe, (1978) was called in the Soviet Union), a film with Sezen Aksu, was a remake of the musical A Star Is Born (1976) with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. Tall, slim, clear-eyed, with a thin, straight nose, and high, wide cheekbones, Bulut Aras played an alcoholic pop idol and not only drank whiskey from a bottle but even washed his face with it. And on his first morning visit to the heroine, while she was making tea in the kitchen, he shamelessly opened the doors of her cupboard in search of alcohol, finally confessing, ‘I never eat breakfast. Can't you find something stronger than tea?’ When Aksu's character reached the heights of fame, she took to whiskey and cigarettes herself without waiting for an invitation.

It is curious that the director of this film, Atıf Yılmaz, just like the director of Along the Night, made a film based on a classic Soviet story shortly before the musical melodrama The Girl with the Red Scarf (Selvi Boylum Al Yazmalim, 1977), based on My Poplar in a Red Scarf by the Kyrgyz Soviet author Chingiz Aitmatov. The story of a young chauffeur who could not cope with early fatherhood, who sought solace in drinking and old girlfriends and finally left his wife and child, was to be transformed into a violent melodrama in the cinematography of an Islamic country (as in the case of Chekhov and Iran, the story was transferred to Turkey). But with the help of his biggest stars, Türkan Şoray and Kadir İnanır, and a superb composer, the director created a weightless, minstrel-like ballad about the changing seasons in a man's life—and the best adaptation of Aitmatov ever filmed.

In The Little Sparrow, he emphasized the newness and originality of the new diva by devising a number for her in which she parodied the Turkish pop stars of the time, especially Ajda Pekkan and her song ‘The Innkeeper’ (‘Hancı’), in which the story of a bitter, drunken tramp who seeks his last refuge in an inn is set to Gaston Rolland's ‘Toccata’, arranged by Paul Mauriat in 1973. At the time, the weather forecast on the main Soviet news program, Vremya, was set against it. Turkish pop music of the 1970s, like the cinema, was an aggregate translation of Western models, with an emphasis on drinking in the lyrics. This is symbolized by Tanju Okan's song ‘Şerefe’ (‘Cheers!’), set to the popular tune ‘El Bimbo’, which the French actress Miou-Miou danced so amusingly to in the 1975 comedy Pas de problème!

In Aksu, these mockingbirds were replaced by a truly national singer with her own repertoire and folk rhythmic background. But nationalism always has a dark side: Yılmaz submerges his film in wet weather and piercing wind, with bare branches reaching out as if to poke the viewer's eye out.

Such an uncomfortable texture is generally characteristic of Turkish genre cinema at the time. In the freezing rain, on asphalt as wet as an ice rink, in headlights that spill out like a murky yolk in the midday darkness, Türkan Şoray runs between the soaked cardboard boxes abandoned by market vendors in search of her kidnapped daughter in the detective story Blind's Man Bluff (Körebe, 1985). This is now the Turkish version of an independent woman—wearing a black raincoat, chain-smoking, abandoned by her husband because, even after the end of her marriage, she eagerly responds to offers from single female colleagues ‘to spend time in a very interesting place where you don't even imagine who I met yesterday’, breaking into squats and criminal dens as if it were nothing.

Through the windshield wipers, smearing the rain across the windshield, we see the credits of another detective movie—Thirsty for Love: Sex and Murder (Aşka Susayanlar: Seks ve Cinayet, 1972). The film revolves around rapes and murders in bare groves on snow that has not melted under the trees. Turkish cinema of the 1970s and 1980s was obsessed with the same trend, of remaking everything Western, as the pop scene, from obvious crowd-pleasers like Star Trek (Ömer the Tourist in Star Trek (Turist Ömer Uzay Yolu'nda), 1973) to the whimsical socio-psychological knitting of The Lacemaker (White Bicycle (Beyaz Bisiklet), 1986). Thirsty is also a remake of Sergio Martino's then-recent giallo The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971). However, the Turkish remake surpasses the original both in terms of vulgarity (while amusing herself in bed with a black man, the heroine tells her friend on the phone: ‘I'm eating chocolate. Yes, chocolate with coconut shavings’) and nudity (girls’ breasts and thighs are bared for no reason; at a party, two girls in paper dresses rip each other's clothes off in the middle of a dance; and a woman returning from the rain, turning her back to the camera, takes off her raincoat and, for some reason, finds herself with a bare ass in the cold). The young, slender Kadir İnanır impressed viewers not only with his eyebrows and eyes or his relaxed social posture but also with the knotted muscles of his youthfully supple back.

It was Mine Mutlu who was the queen of Turkish sex cinema at that time. The titles of her films are enough to make you smile: My Freckled Chick (Çilli Yavrum Çilli, 1975), Sweet and Painful (Tatlı Sert, 1975), A Chick Flies In, A Bird Flies Out (Civciv Çıkacak Kuş Çıkacak, 1975). As one can guess from these films, Ms Mutlu was not inspired by giallo but by that idiotic branch of Italian comedies in which beautiful young women are portrayed as lustful females who, for some reason, cannot leave the puffy, mustachioed family men alone. In Hold Me, Melahat (Kokla Beni, Melahat, 1975), the heroine strips down to her panties in a compartment with a chubby stranger, and as she hypnotizes him with cigarette smoke, we see his face through her eyes—the mustachioed face is replaced by a portrait of Alain Delon. In another scene, dressed in exactly the same way, she walks toward a peacefully sleeping, frail man, also mustachioed, holding a phallic-shaped vase by the stem. It's frightening to think what kind of game she's playing, but at the crucial moment, she ‘only’ smashes the vase over his head. Even that is followed by an argument about the man not paying enough attention to her.

In Turkey, as in Iran, lowlife cinema was flourishing at the time. What is more, its leading actor, its Delon and Belmondo combined, who eventually turned to directing and put Turkey on the map of the film world as a director, spent a third of his life in prison. However, it was mainly for political reasons that Yılmaz Güney was imprisoned. The first time was for communist agitation. It was said that he was not particularly handsome—he had stubby ears, a nose like a duck's bill, flaccid, capricious lips under protruding cheekbones. But he was able to translate that existential detachment from the flow and the destiny, the de rigueur sign of appreciation of the semi-criminal idols of the time. He shot almost none of his films entirely by himself: he was thrown in jail in the middle of a shoot, and in his cell, he would sketch storyboards that his friends would use to film the missing scenes. This is how he made The Road (Yol, 1982), which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. The film was made semi-underground, under the conditions of the military dictatorship, and it seems that political considerations played an important role in the festival jury's decision.

The point is that Güney's films were too free from imitation of European auteur cinema, sometimes resembling rote dictations rather than essays. One of the few films he directed entirely himself was The Desperate (Umutsuzlar, 1971). Güney shoots distant, wide shots with the main characters through bare branches, the foreground out of focus. These shots are indeed striking. The device of a hidden surveillance camera will be later used to shoot groundbreaking political thrillers about the intrigues of the secret services: The Assassination (L'Attentat, France, 1972, directed by Yves Boisset) and Three Days of the Condor (USA, 1975, directed by Sydney Pollack), whose style, in turn, would be used in our century by Steven Spielberg, shooting his film about the aftermath of the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympic Games, Munich (2005). The meeting of a couple in love—a bandit and a dancer, at a country wedding, two people who are forbidden from confessing their feelings to each other—and the couple who brings them together, as if by chance, in a dance, their wordless conversation with their gazes accompanied by tango music, is reminiscent of the meeting between the spy Stirlitz and his wife in the legendary Soviet TV show Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973), and the weddings in The Godfather (1972) and Emir Kusturica's films. However, the director is too obsessed with making the beautiful Filiz Akın, with her charmingly upturned nose, look like Catherine Deneuve. Her mane is bleached to such an extent that one fears for the actress, whose hair might fall out from so much recoloring and varnishing, rather than for her character. The dances are copied from The Young Girls of Rochefort (Les demoiselles de Rochefort, 1967), the lace-collared nightgowns are similar to those from Repulsion (1965), as is the close-up of the suffering Akın leaning her cheek against the wall, which lingers on the screen for almost a third of the film. It is clear that Güney has made a film about constraint, about the fate of any attempt to escape the closed circle of social relations. But in the end, the viewer feels constrained, trapped in a collection of schoolboy copies of European hits that are not very friendly to Turkish material, including the acting.

The French New Wave only helped the Iranian lowlife wave to get air in its lungs—and to soar to its own heights, unlike anything else. The dictates of European cinematic good taste were sucking the air out of Turkish films, which is not surprising. What counts for the country's art is the people's sense of inner freedom, their capacity for existential action. Art lives through freedom. Iranian cinema under the shah was vibrant, soaring, because the Iranians lived with the premonition of revolution and eventually made it happen. Regardless of the results, a revolution is the romantic impulse of an entire people. Turkish cinema has remained within its shell because Turkish society has remained in the position of a buyer overwhelmed by the salesman who offers him suits that may be okay but are certainly too tight for him to breathe in.