Cem Yılmaz goes to the wild wild west in "Yahşi Batı"

While the best part of “Yahşi Batı” is the trademark Cem Yılmaz jokes, the worst part is that this is not really a film despite its acceptable story structure. It is just an expensive production to satisfy audiences that can’t find or afford tickets to his show.

What is so astounding at this point is the amount of money gone into making the Western locations and costumes look authentic along with the glitzy cinematography. Yet there remains limited directing, as Sorak tentatively keeps away from character development and also from tackling the potential gold mine of deeper dynamics between these characters. I wonder if that’s too much to ask from a movie which clearly and solely aims to make viewers roar with laughter along with the complementary equation that the viewers come to laugh.

However, one still feels that there is a certain “je ne sais quoi” missing here, considering all the money spent. Not that it matters for the producers, since the movie will surely become a box-office hit in no time -- if lucky it might even surpass the “Recep İvedik” record. I’d prefer Cem Yılmaz jokes to the vulgar Recep İvedik any day.

So, the date is 1881; unbeknownst to lead man Aziz Efendi (Yılmaz) and his sidekick Lemi Galip (long-time collaborator Ozan Güven), it is the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Naturally that doesn’t change their pride in being Ottoman, especially when it comes to the fact that they’ve been chosen for a special mission to deliver a priceless diamond to the president of the US as a gift from the Ottoman sultan. It isn’t long before the duo loses the diamond to a gang of renegade cowboys while traveling in a stagecoach in the plains of the Midwest. (At this point I was thinking, how did these nincompoops find themselves in the Midwest in the first place, assuming they crossed the Atlantic Ocean? Logic must be waived).

Penniless and broke, they try all sorts of scams and small business ideas to earn enough money to get the diamond back. Wouldn’t you know it, just to please the movie’s sponsor Cola Turka they even invent cola.

On their journey they meet a Calamity Jane-inspired woman called Suzan Van Dyke (rising star Demet Evgar), who decides to accompany them while they try to retrieve the diamond. In the natural order of things, Aziz falls in love with the assertively independent Suzan and in a very pleasingly unexpected way tells her that “he sees the true woman beneath the masculine shield.”

The duo now turned into a trio -- luckily there’s no love triangle here -- run into an Indian tribe and encounter the evil town sheriff/priest Lloyd (actor Zafer Algöz who performs here with his acidic expressions and slithering accent like that of an annoying village imam), as they try to find out where the diamond is. The plot here doesn’t mean as much as the opportunities Yılmaz takes to not only poke his stick in to taken-for-granted norms of Turkish culture -- for example we see a homoerotic take on oil wrestling and a hilarious adaptation of an April 23, National Sovereignty and Children’s Day school play. But more than that, it is the Turkish idioms that Yılmaz literalizes that can make moviegoers fall off their seats laughing.

Thankfully Yılmaz pulled down the didactic tone that was abundant in the previous “A.R.O.G.” But still his favorite theme, the Eastern-Western clash, will be detected throughout. He especially shows how disturbed he is by the pejorative stereotypes that the West has anointed to the East this time -- the “do you people ride camels?” joke becomes a recurring line. Furthermore, there’s a lengthy tirade in which Aziz Efendi presents a lecture on tolerance and equality. Mind you, Yılmaz is also aware of the superiority and inferiority complexes blended in our own collective psychologies, and he has no qualms in disrupting them, either. At one point the typically İstanbulite sidekick Lemi says “What am I doing here? I’m an İstanbul kid and I know four languages.” You know what I mean.

“Yahşi Batı” will seem like the funniest material (not movie) Yılmaz has come up with in a long time, but here’s the catch -- only if you’re intimately familiar with Turkish humor and language. Well, you know, some things are enjoyable only if they stay particular.