Damn.

I'm used to seeing Turkish films which are a quarter of a century old if not older, made in days when special effects were more cost-prohibitive and the knowledge of how to achieve them hadn't very effectively disseminated throughout the world. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Cuneyt Arkin films, for instance, because many of them, even most of them, are made with having a good time in mind. Let's say they're like some hole-in-the-wall pub where the food is simple but it hits the spot, and the beer isn't imported or of very high grade, but before you know it everyone's buying each other drinks and telling dubious stories that are no less entertaining for their lack of veracity, and every time you think back on that night you can't help but smile--even though, invariably, any attempt to share the experience with someone who wasn't there loses its power in the telling. That's something like the essence of many Cuneyt Arkin movies for me.

So then I'm perusing Turkish movies online when I stumble across the second legit Turkish DVD release that I've ever seen. The first is The Man Who Saved the World, and the second is G.O.R.A. And I read that it's a science fiction comedy, and it came out in 2004, and allegedly it was the highest-budgeted Turkish film ever, and... well, I had to see it. Frankly, I wasn't sure what to expect. Would it be funny? Would it be stupid? Would the special effects still be a poor imitation of more expensive ones (and more importantly, would I be bored enough to notice?)?

The answer is, this movie is great. Writer/star Cem Yilmaz is excellent in this film, which is a strange combination of very random absurdist humor, tongue-in-cheek pastiches of famous science fiction films, a parody of science fiction at large, and an incisive satire of science fiction as it has largely tended to be written in Hollywood. The characters are likable, the comedy is top-notch, the special effects are certainly good enough to satisfy me, and leading lady Ozge Ozberk (there would be umlauts over the Os except that for some reason that gives these posts formatting problems) is just gorgeous. Even if you're not attracted to women (who- and whatever you are), you will have to appreciate the beauty of this woman.

I don't really want to waste time on plot summary here, but in a nutshell... (Note: if you already decided you'd buy the film, don't read this. Just buy it and watch it when it arrives. Skip this paragraph.) Arif is a cornball photographer and rug salesman who takes pictures of plates in midair and tries to sell them as UFO photographs. He ends up being abducted by actual aliens, known as Gorans, and taken prisoner. The prisoners are eventually put on planet Gora, where he meets a large man with dreadlocks named Bob Marley Faruk. Bob pretends to help Arif escape, but each scheme is only Bob's way of demonstrating the futility of escape, as they all fail. It isn't until fate gives Arif the chance to win the heart of the beautiful princess Ceku and foil the plans of the evil Commander Logar that escape becomes possible, but then a new challenge arises: Arif must avoid being killed by Logar, and return to reclaim his love and take her back to Earth.

G.O.R.A. is brilliant, as far as I'm concerned. If this were a scholarly treatment of the film, I could start batting around terms and expressions like "intertextuality," "cosmopolitanism," "cultural interaction," "subverting the dominant discourse," and so on. In other words, although the jokes are sometimes really absurd, the script is very intelligent. It pokes fun at Hollywood, at the expectations of science fiction that Hollywood especially has engendered, and at a number of foreign (to Turkey) science fiction movies, including The Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Fifth Element. It's also full of different languages; there's some English, some Turkish, and bits of Spanish, German, and Japanese. We're clearly

In other words, this film both is science fiction and is about science fiction; it's a movie unto itself, but also a comment on the movies which we've hitherto been watching. And while the message that it sends isn't necessarily something that no one else has thought of, it sends that message clearly and effectively, and without losing any entertainment value along the way. In other words, tonight I stepped into a swanky, stylish bar, only to find that the owner is the son of the guy who owns that pub I mentioned before. And I recognized some of the patrons, and we still bought each other our drinks, and told all kinds of stories, and even though they sold imports on tap, these bargoers had the self-possession not to lose track of who and where they were just because some of the beer, and the music, and the food wasn't local. And I had just as good a time, and I could feel satisfied that even if the heyday of that old pub has passed, its legacy will live on.

Now, if half-baked extended metaphors turn you off, and moreso pseudo-quasi-academic talk of cultural interaction and discursive manipulation, then let me make sure that I'm not leading you astray. If you're not interested in metacinema, and you're not interested in figuring out what the hell I meant about drinking in Turkish pubs (what?), well, you don't have to to like G.O.R.A. It's a very funny and highly entertaining movie, and easily among the best Turkish films I've ever seen. In fact, it might well be one of my favorite movies. I strongly encourage you to see if it might be one of yours, as well.

Labels: Country: Turkey, Science Fiction