Overlooked Movie: Turkish Delight

The nudity had been part of this all along and I gave it a 5min thought because I was and am relatively shy. But so what. It's skin. Isn't that really our outfit. Puritanism. Conventionalism. Hypocrisy have helped to make it overrated. Women have had to do this for so long. Big deal. Nope. There is more than enough to say about this film but I leave it here for now. ~Rutger Hauer on his role in Turkish Delight



Sort of a cross between "Love Story" and an earthy Rembrandt painting, this movie stars Rutger Hauer as a gifted Dutch sculptor who has a stormy, erotic, and star-crossed romance with a beautiful young girl. The story follows the arc of their relationship and his interaction with her family. Told in flashback form, initially Hauer is seen as a libertine lothario collector, taking trophies from his sexual conquests and pasting them in a book. He sees a sculpture he made of his lost lover and goes into a flashback of his relationship with his wife. He meets the girl, falls in love with/marries her, and we meet her parents: a charming, well meaning, bumbling father, and his shrew of a wife, who's convinced Hauer's too much of a bohemian to make a good mate for her daughter. Eventually, the petty jealousies, the sexual hijinks, and the climactic vomit scene prove too much for the marriage, and sculptor and his lady fair separate. Flash forward several months, and Hauer finds the girl back in Holland after an American sojourn. Their reunion is short lived; the somewhat melodramatic ending mirrors "Love Story".

Some scenes from the movie set to Enya's Only Time... Too cheesy for words, watch it with the sound off. What is with this silly musical montages on You Tube?


Fun Trivia:
Although forbidden in the Netherlands because of being a commercial in disguise, all cars driven in the film were made by British Leyland (Rover, Triumph, et cetera).

In 1973 it was the most successful Dutch film ever and a as of 2005 is still the most attended Dutch film in the Netherlands.

In 1995, in order to celebrate the centenary of the birth of cinema, the Dutch Postal Service issued a stamp with a famous scene taken from “Turks Fruit”.



Fun Quotes:
Eric Vonk: I screw better than God.

Rutger Hauer on his role in Turkish Delight
Time, although the videotape gets old and the celluloid is about to crumble, does not matter memory. The book by Jan Wolkers was such a beautiful story. More than anything the "feel" of the story was so close to me. After going through the rather new and unusual testing & casting process the role did land me as its "tool". I got to practice sculpture with the man who had sort of lived and sculptured the book. The writer was and still is an unusual sculpturer of words. I had three different sources to draw from other than the screenplay. The brand new feature director Paul Verhoeven, the writer and his book. Such a luxury for any actor. My biggest difficulty I would experience was a kind of a nasty/cruel and ugly sense of humour which was in the script as well as in the director. I hated some of those moments. Dog/Fist on fake breast of mother/some nasty and rudeness with the women Erik fucks/dancing on a table in a restaurant. Some of that was a bit much. But Paul just wanted that. There were more things. But the thing that carried me was what I knew about love. And my newfound love: "Making movies". What a blast.

Erik's character is "cool" enough to know he does not possess this woman. And it is forever. He and I shared a certain understanding that life goes on no matter what. Without diminishing any meaning of depth that was before. I had hardly any ideas of what it was I was doing as an actor. I enjoyed it immensely. The fact that it caught an enormous international audience had not even dawned on me. Not that it seemed important but it opened my eyes to the chance it gave me.