Sexual Retribution

By JAY COCKS

TURKISH DELIGHT

Directed by PAUL VERHOEVEN Screenplay by GERARD SOETEMAN

The title of this baleful escapade refers to a thick, sticky, sugar-coated candy which the heroine gorges as she lies dying of a brain tumor while her husband watches. Both of them are always up to blithe little turns like that. During the course of their hopped-up marriage, he (Rutger Hauer) and she (Monique van de Ven) spend a good deal of their time giving the proles an eyeful. She likes riding on the back of his bike, affording a more than generous view of her bikini underwear, or wearing dresses with the kind of breakaway neckline generally favored by nursing mothers. He enjoys poking his mother-in-law in her prosthetic breast, or subjecting his wife to strenuous bouts of copulation.

All this is made to look giddy and free and challengingly rebellious. This Dutch export is decked out with many of the same attitudes--they might collectively be called punk psychotic--that animated the recent French film Going Places (TIME, June 10). Both movies share the same craving for shock value, the same dim idea that freedom and aggressive irresponsibility are the same. Going Places, however, remained anxiously airy throughout. In Turkish Delight, Director Paul Verhoeven and Writer Gerard Soeteman try to yank the rug right out from under the middle of the film, suddenly portraying everything that had seemed gay as a fierce and desperate stall against fate.

Broken Wing. Their device is the revelation that the wife has a brain tumor. If the movie was forced in its coarseness at the beginning, the sentimentality with which it concludes is simply rancid. The wife begins to flirt with other men, and the husband delivers his rebuke by vomiting all over her. When she leaves him, he adopts a seagull with a broken wing, nursing it back to health. This serves to demonstrate that there is a gentle nature lurking beneath all that calculated vulgarity. In any event, they are reunited. He allows her to stuff herself with candy the way he fed fish to the seagull, and in the end he watches her die horribly, her head shaven, her eyes bulging with fear.

The respectful notices that this film received after its initial U.S. opening in Los Angeles are puzzling enough, but it has nowhere been noted that Turkish Delight represents a particularly vicious fantasy of sexual retribution. The wife cuts out on the husband--because he likes to copulate too much, she tells him later--and leads a miserable life, moving from one lover to another, looking freakier and acting freakier. The tumor, presumably, is the final punishment for her infidelity and desertion, and allows her wronged husband the priceless opportunity to be magnanimous, to forgive and to cherish. Her death gives him poignant pause, but it is never forcefully indicated that it must have been much rougher on her.

.Jay Cocks

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