Bliss

In an early scene of “Bliss,” the glowering stepmother of Meryem, a teenage rape victim in eastern Anatolia, gives the girl a rope with which to hang herself for bringing dishonor to her family, and you prepare to endure a Turkish variation of “The Stoning of Soraya M.” That recent harrowing film, based on a true incident, depicted the public execution of a young Iranian woman falsely accused of adultery, with the graphic ferocity of B-movie torture porn.
“Bliss,” fortunately, is not a one-note exposé created to shock, although its vision of a misogynistic patriarchy is almost as repellent. Adapted from Zulfu Livaneli’s 2002 novel, it observes the collision of two cultures, one ancient, the other modern, in contemporary Turkey. Directed and produced by Abdullah Oguz, “Bliss” has ravishing cinematography by Mirsad Herovic and a mystical score by Mr. Livaneli that match the novel’s feverish, poetic language. The natural beauty of the waters around Istanbul is breathtaking. And once the story moves from the Anatolian village where Meryem’s unconscious, brutalized body is discovered by a shepherd, the movie’s initially monochromatic palette bursts into brilliant color.
More than the novel, the film focuses on Meryem’s steady awakening to her own autonomy. After fitting a noose around her neck, Meryem (Ozgu Namal) removes it and refuses to kill herself as tradition dictates. Her stern uncle Ali Riza (Mustafa Avkiran), the dignitary in the rural village who decreed her suicide, decides to wait for his son Cemal (Murat Han) to kill her when he returns from the army. Cemal’s instructions are to take Meryem, his cousin, to Istanbul on the pretext of an arranged marriage and dispose of her en route.
The young soldier’s sympathy for the disgraced girl, whom he routinely reviles as a whore and smacks in the face at any suggestion of what he deems improper female behavior, conflicts with his fundamentalist beliefs. In one scene he calls her a demon after having an erotic dream about her. But he can also be tenderly protective.
He delays the killing until they reach the city, where they visit his brother Yakup (Erol Babaoglu), who disparages the village’s benighted customs. Still feeling obliged to follow orders, Cemal takes Meryem to a bridge and instructs her to jump. But when the do-or-die moment arrives, he plucks her from the edge, and the cousins become fellow fugitives from their repressive background.
They find lodging and work on a remote fish farm and later on the yacht of Irfan (Talat Bulut), a suave, white-haired Turkish professor, educated in the United States, who has just left his unhappy marriage to a wealthy woman.
In one of the most pointed scenes of culture clash, Irfan instructs Cemal to set the table and serve dinner. When Cemal refuses to do “women’s work,” Irfan exerts his authority as the ship’s captain and declares, “There are no women’s jobs and men’s jobs on my boat.”
Cemal also assumes that the fatherly interest Irfan takes in Meryem is really lust waiting to pounce. And when she disappears with Irfan on his motorboat to observe marine life, a potentially lethal tussle between the soldier and professor breaks out upon their return. Irfan has his own demons: his dream is to find a way of living in which he doesn’t have to think about tomorrow.
As Cemal and Meryem discover the cosmopolitan world, with its bikinied young women who drop by from other boats, Meryem chafes at Cemal’s dominance. But traditional ways don’t die easily. Cemal’s indoctrination in hyper-masculine authoritarianism runs to his very core, and he often reacts violently without thinking. The movie goes out of its way to ridicule his attachment to his macho military title, “commando.”
There are moments aboard the boat in which the competitive male rituals between him and Irfan recall Roman Polanski’s “Knife in the Water.” But the game-playing psychodrama in “Bliss” is only a minor element in a panoramic allegory of Turkish national identity, beautifully acted by Mr. Han, Mr. Bulut and especially by Ms. Namal.
The screenplay, written by Mr. Oguz with Kubilay Tuncer and Elif Ayan, turns the novel, in which the rapist’s identity is disclosed early on, into a thriller in which the truth is revealed in an explosive Hollywood ending that rather too neatly ties up loose ends left dangling in the book. However streamlined, this consistently gripping, visually intoxicating film stands as a landmark of contemporary Turkish cinema.
Da The New York Times, 7 agosto 2009