I don’t suppose, therefore, I should have been very surprised on a recent journey to look up from my bit of chicken jammed into a plastic tray to discover the slightly less well-known Turkish actor Haluk Bilginer building a car (and finding salvation) on a screen three rows in front of the emergency aisle.There is a pleasant congruence between the subject of the film (“Devrim Arabaları,” or Cars of the Revolution) and the decision by THY to show a made-in-Turkey film in-flight. The story revolves around the somewhat whimsical decision of President Cemal Gürsel, the general who (reluctantly by all accounts) fronted the 1960 military coup, that Turkey needed to produce its very own automobile. A collective of engineers assigned to the state railway factory in Eskişehir were ordered to have working models ready in a mere 130 days to join the parade of Republic Day festivities of Oct. 29, 1961. If a barely industrialized Turkey had the gumption to build its own car back then, surely today’s filmmakers today can produce something to entertain a captive plane audience over Hungarian airspace, THY’s thinking must have run.
The thing about “Devrim” -- the name for revolution but also the brand name of the new vehicle -- was that no one was really quite sure why it was being built. It was one thing to bash out a prototype, another to set up an assembly line. One of the dramatic moments of the film is when a crusty old metalworker solves the problem of a piston that just can’t take the strain by adding a smidgen more chrome to the molten mix. You can just see the young Ralph Nader sharpening his writs.
We are led early on to believe that the whole project was a waste of public funds. (Someone points out that if the car were to go into production, Turkey’s trading partners would retaliate by raising the tariffs on the hazelnuts they imported -- which, if true, is an odd dramatic device -- like Hamlet’s ghost advising his son not to seek revenge since it would wreak havoc with Danish crisp bread exports.) But though the film tries to strike a patriotic chord, it is not really an ode to the pre-Özal policies of protectionism and import substitution. The uplifting music and overall sonorous tone suggests that director Tolga Örnek is trying to create a Turkish Chariots of Fire -- an uplifting story about human endeavor with a bit of national pride to rasp the rough edges. This sits uneasily with the climax of the film, which is that the car works but at its coming-out ceremony someone neglected to stop at the petrol pump first. President Gürsel travels 100 meters before his Devrim putters to a halt. “We built a car, like Westerners, but forgot to fill the tank, just like Easterners,” he said in the film and in real life. But that’s not quite the moral of the tale, either.
The Devrim episode coincides with one of the most contentious moments in Turkish history. At one point, the radio announces the death sentences imposed upon deposed former Prime Minister Menderes and his ministers. In an “author’s message,” the head engineer tells his crew that whether they approve or disapprove of the verdict, there is no point in discussing it since they have to get on with the job. “Let me just tell my story,” Örnek seems to plead.
So be it. The thing about Hollywood pap I watch in-flight, it is designed to travel across frontiers. Did this story about a Turkish Rocky Balboa in the shape of an ersatz Dodge manage to cross borders as well? It didn’t, like its namesake, run out of gas, since it wasn’t entirely about getting Turkey to feel good about itself. Even so, as the plane prepared for descent and the viewing screens flipped up and the landing wheels flipped down, I found myself feeling grateful that the current Turkish president did not celebrate his own victory in the teeth of military opposition by summoning the country’s best brains to build a passenger aircraft to be operational by the end of that year.
