On the agenda (we suppose) were the events in northern Iraq and the government’s reaction to a referendum scheduled this November. Military action may be in the cards.Alas, the Parliament has met too late. There are already freelance Turkish agents roaming around Kirkuk, seizing oil installations, placing the hapless American unit guarding the facilities under detention, and generally raising hell. Plus, they tell jokes.
Of course, this is all happening on the silver screen. The latest Turkish comedy to invade Turkey’s cinemas is called “The Five Masked Men in Iraq.” The title is a reference to the Turkish commandos up to goodness-knows-what near Kirque who in July 2003 were “bagged” with burlap sacks over their head and shipped by their American captors back home.
That episode and the resentment it provoked provides the starting point for a previous Turkish box office wonder -- not a sensitive plea to understand we are all rivulets flowing into the same cosmic ocean, but a revenge epic with an attitude that makes Rambo look like Doonesbury. Even if you were thinking of buying the DVD, I do not think I am giving anything away when I reveal that “Valley of the Wolves Iraq” ends with our hero -- the friend of one of the hooded Turkish soldiers driven to suicide by his own shame -- piercing the heart of the sinister American responsible for it all, a Christian fundamentalist special forces commander whose idea of fun is shooting up wedding parties and then having the victims dissected in the hope of finding a few undamaged organs to put on ice for shipment to London or Tel Aviv.
In the middle of the film a religious sheikh flashes the authors’ message that cutting journalists’ heads off with scimitars is so last-millennium and that anyone contemplating a suicide bombing should get a life. This is not the saving grace that prevented me from tsking opprobrium at a film tinged with anti-Semitism that also glorifies violence. Nor is it VotWI’s tit-for-tat political incorrectness; its efforts to hoist with their own petard all those tacky Chuck Norris slashers and episodes of “24” which preach it’s OK to behave like a thuggee in the right cause. Like the audience at “Springtime for Hitler,” I guess I was impressed by the film’s sheer gall.
But enough is enough. Had “Five Masked Men in Iraq” been a parody of its grim predecessor I might have laughed along. Instead it is intended as light-hearted tribute to VotWI’s ultra-nationalist aspirations. The eponymous five are well-intended layabouts who decided to capture an American-guarded oil installation in Iraq to restore to Turkey the petroleum that is rightly theirs. During the course of which they upset the local Kurdish grandee who has been benefiting from siphoning off the oil. There are a few nasty racist sniggers about the wild men -- black American soldiers --and the Kurdish tribesmen are slapstick morons. Apart from that it’s badly scripted, feebly directed, and not really all that funny. I snoozed through a modest chunk.
Of course, there is also an obligatory message where the Five realize that it might not be the wisest thing in the world to go around invading neighboring countries, but there is also a “cinema realité” moment where real life TV presenter Savaş Ay goes off to interview the naughty men and confirm that they are acting from patriotic moments and that their hearts are in the right place.
I don’t want too sound more pious about this, but I concur with the Turkish film director Derviş Zaim (whom I do respect) who said at a recent seminar that filmmakers in countries like Turkey have an obligation not so much to make politically correct movies but not to pander to base instinct.I hate to think what the sequel will be. “Five Masked Men in Osmanbey,” perhaps, where our heroes occupy an Armenian language newspaper in Istanbul in order to improve the flow of news. Hilarious.
