Turkish Delight

Directed by Paul Verhoeven, Turkish Delight follows Rutger Hauer’s impetuous sculpter Eric Vonk as he falls in love with (and eventually marries) a beautiful young woman named Olga (Monique van de Ven) – with the movie, for the most part, detailing the ups and downs of the couple’s subsequent relationship. It’s rather distressing to note that Turkish Delight gets off to a tedious, underwhelming note, as Verhoeven, working from Gerard Soeteman’s script, kicks the proceedings off with a series of sequences revolving around the central character’s sexual conquests – with the aimless (and far-from-plausible) vibe persisting up until the narrative pushes into an extended flashback set two years earlier. It’s at that point that Turkish Delight begins to become something approaching a watchable drama, as Verhoven emphasizes the unabashedly melodramatic relationship between Hauer and van de Ven’s respective characters. The episodic midsection, which revolves around Eric and Olga’s freewheeling exploits, is often as exasperating as it is entertaining, however, and there’s ultimately little doubt that the movie would’ve benefited from a much shorter running time (ie 108 minutes is simply an unreasonable length for a story this uneventful). By the time it reaches its tearjerking (yet uninvolving) final stretch, Turkish Delight has established itself as a wisp of a movie that suffers from an almost total dearth of memorable elements – with the only real exception to this Hauer’s captivatingly impulsive performance.

** out of ****