Turks Fruit

EN

“[The] first ten minutes may give the impression that Turks Fruit is a licentious picture, but this obfuscates the fact that these flings do not satisfy Erik. He suffers from such lovesickness that he can only enjoy sex with Olga, the one woman who had left him and had soon thereafter contracted an incurable disease, as a lengthy flashback will reveal. The merit of Turks Fruit resides in its ability to keep a balance between ever-changing moods: it was free-spirited and funny, romantic and macabre. This ‘porn-chic’ production exceeded all boxoffice expectations and became the all-time number one in the Netherlands with over 3.3 million viewers.”

Peter Verstraten1

“As soon as sex is involved in mainstream film, any balance gets disturbed. That happens with Turks Fruit also, but at the same time the film partly compensates for this imbalance in two ways. Sex scenes can bewilder a mainstream movie when its main effect is to evoke excitement and arousal; in short, when the scene is ‘hot.’ Turks Fruit tones down this effect by associating sex with death and decay on the one hand and with humour on the other hand.”

Peter Verstraten2

“What Hauer still likes about Turks Fruit is its earthiness. ‘The acting is not posing. Paul’s images are far from whitewashed. Flesh and rubbish are mixed together. Abroad, Turks Fruit was compared with Love Story, but I think that’s inappropriate. In that film everything was much smoother, the images had been spotlit to perfection. In film, I like to work with my hands, which fitted well with the character of the sculptor Erik. But after I went to the States, they kept going on about my dirty fingernails, even if I was playing an android or a serial killer. To my surprise, clean hands are compulsory in Hollywood, even for the worst villains. One of the things you can never accuse Paul of is stretching the truth about life, as he clearly showed in Turks Fruit.’”

Rutger Hauer in Paul Verhoeven by Rob van Scheers3

“The unsettling focus on excrement in Turkish Delight represents just one possible category of abjection that Kristeva has identified as a threat to our adult sexual identity. Under the general label of ‘waste matter’, this bodily product can be seen as provoking unease in its viewer, not because of any intrinsically disgusting qualities, but because it references an archaic period of our infancy that adult, civilised society seeks to repress. Its existence in Verhoeven’s film is supplemented by several other categories of depiction that can classified as abject.”

Xavier Mendik4

• 1Peter Verstraten, Dutch Post-War Fiction Film through a Lens of Psychoanalysis (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 29-30.
• 2Peter Verstraten, Humour and Irony in Dutch Post-War Fiction Film (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 186.
• 3Rob Van Scheers, Paul Verhoeven, trans. Aletta Stevens (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), 88.
• 4Xavier Mendik, “Turkish Delight (Turks Fruit, 1973),” in The Cinema of the Low Countries, ed. Ernest Mathijs. (New York: Wallflower Press, 2004), 116.