In Muhsin Ertuğrul’s remake of the “Blue Angel” (the jollily named “Şehvet Kurbanı” or “victim of lust”) it is an artfully shot train which takes the eponymous hero away from friends and family to his ultimate disgrace in the pursuit of a fancy woman in Adana. The film was made in 1940 (the year of Hitchcock’s “The Lady Vanishes,” among the most famous train films ever made) and has in its writing credits Turkey’s most famous modern poet Nazım Hikmet, whose own work captures the notion of the “black train” that steals you from home and loved ones in search of work. Galib Usta, a character in his epic poem “Human Landscapes from My Country,” can think of nothing else as he disembarks the train at Haydarpaşa Station other than whether he will die in his own bed covered by his own quilt.The train to the exile of employment abroad reappears in Halit Refiğ’s 1964 film “Gurbet Kuşları” (Birds of Exile). And of course there are trains that appear famously in the films written by Yılmaz Güney and “directed” by remote control from his prison cell. In the 1978 film “Sürü” (The Herd) the train is a conduit between the blood feuds of eastern Turkey and the brutally dispassionate world of Ankara. It is also a microcosm of that transition. Isolated villagers in empty landscapes watch as the train goes by. The family is cheated, robbed and humiliated by the conductors and their fellow passengers before they reach journey’s end. In 1982, when ET was trying to get home by flying saucer, Yılmaz Güney’s jail birds on home furlough were still taking the train. The train was a portal, like a run-down Hogwarts Express, but more to a disenchanted world where feudal constraints are harsher and more restrictive than the prison from which the cast of characters has come.
So it is not surprising to see a train winding its way across the screen in the first reel of a recent art house offering, “Mutluluk” (Bliss) in circumstances where you might think the characters would take the bus. The film is based on a novel by Zülfü Livaneli, who has directed films himself and is responsible for the score. The director, here, is Abdullah Oğuz, better known for his work in Turkish television and producer of the popular television mini-series “Asmalı Konak” (Hanging-Garden House). The train only makes a brief appearance. It is carrying two cousins, Meryem and Cemal, away from an eastern Turkey governed by a patriarchal code -- or töre.
Unbeknownst to Meryem, Cemal has been ordered by the family to take her to Istanbul for a nefarious purpose. She has been raped, rendered unclean, and only her death will wipe the slate clean. Once the couple gets to Istanbul -- a landscape shot in the same somber colors as the East they left behind -- Cemal finds the sentence impossible to carry out and the two escape to the bright blue of the Aegean with the family elders in hot pursuit.
There is much to admire in “Bliss.” The film looks very good; unlike many Turkish films someone has thought hard about the plot’s structure, Mr Livaneli’s score adds to the drama, and the performances makes sense. Yet I have a reservation about the whole engine which keeps the plot moving. Töre strikes me as being that little bit too pat.
Perhaps it was always the case. In the film “Yol,” töre is the bedrock of an unjust social system, false consciousness on a near cosmic scale. Here it is portrayed as an arcane code of conduct, out of sync with modern Turkey, where honor is easily besmirched and laboriously avenged. Of course, it turns out that one of the characters most eager to see kangaroo-court töre justice done has the most to hide, but for the most part the characters abide by an atavistic, irrational code of conduct which like the pods in the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” makes people behave in way that makes no sense. It makes for great suspense. As such, it has been appropriated by television soaps (including the long-running Friday night epic “Sıla,” the story of an İstanbul-born Kurd fighting her own traditions). Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water, some tore-obsessed individual comes along snapping their jaws. I do not believe that cinema has to strive for political correctness. A little bit of exploitation does no one any harm. But film always works better when it tears away at stereotypes. It is time for the train to move on.
