The Unforgettable Director of Love Movies

Haşmet Asilkan directed dozens of romances through the sixties and seventies. Nobody wants those films any more, and he no longer wants to make them. He has a screenplay: a period film with social content, about an activist who takes a factory owner and his daughter hostage. He goes door to door looking for a producer and finally talks Abdülkadir round. For the lead he has Müjde Ar in mind. The subject is not cinema but a man repudiating his own past. Haşmet looks down on the work he did and wants intellectuals to take him seriously; the film both understands the wish and finds it ridiculous. Far more people watched his romances than will ever watch his art film. The form is a film inside a film. Set scenes, rehearsals and pieces of the film being shot fold together, and the real production conditions of Yeşilçam are shown directly: the money running out, an actor not turning up, the script changing on set. Among Yavuz Turgul's work with Şener Şen this is the one most directly about cinema. Turgul had himself worked as a screenwriter in Yeşilçam and the production detail is first-hand. Şener Şen plays Haşmet, with Oktay Kaynarca and Pıtırcık Akerman in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like films in which Turkish cinema looks at itself, and Şener Şen. Who it is not for: anyone without the Yeşilçam context; part of both the comedy and the pain requires knowing that period.