Verhoeven’s Turkish Delight: A Real Treat

Our Horace? Paul Verhoeven, or so stands his reputation. His Hollywood run from Robocop (1987) to Starship Troopers (1997) has made him the darling of a couple generations of American Letterboxd enthusiasts. And rightly so! Few have dissected the American body politic with such precision. And certainly none has ever done so sporting such a wry smirk.

Over the years, I’ve taken in a number of Verhoeven’s films, and I’ve loved every last one. It was only last week, however, that I had the pleasure of encountering Turkish Delight (1973), one of his early Dutch-language comedies. It delighted me more than I ever could have expected and deconstructs the tried (though not tired) romantic-comedic formula as it does so.

Turkish Delight follows Eric Vonk (Rutger Hauer) as a sculptor and local Amsterdam lothario who seems equal parts committed to bedding women and hating them. We watch as he has violent dreams about murdering a couple, only for him to wake up and immediately begin pleasuring himself as he murmurs about scatological sex acts. We are indeed in Verhoeven territory.

The film rewinds two years to a happier time: Eric meets Olga Stapels (Monique van de Ven) on the roadside. He’s hitchhiking. The two get down to it in comically 70s fashion, having sex in the car quicker than most people today can initiate small talk. Unsurprisingly, their distracted driving leads to an accident. In great contrast to the man we saw in the movie’s opening, Eric takes care of her and soon the two begin dating despite her small-business-owning family’s protest. He is poor; he is an artist; he is a sex pest. But they are soon hitched at the courthouse surrounded by the prematurely pregnant (a very funny scene all its own). Domestic bliss seems to have won over even her stodgy mom. The rest concerns their descent into disagreement and their relationship’s implosion.

I cannot stress strongly enough how important sex is to them; it’s a constant. It saturates his work, for which Olga models and much of which shows her in the nude. Sex in this film is a primal relationship. Verhoeven shows us what earlier romantic comedies only dared suggest.

But this cannot last. Against Olga’s wishes, he sells a sketch of her made in an intimate moment. Eric makes the decision (we suspect, though Verhoeven does not show us) because he isn’t doing well economically. The raucous joy of their domestic world cannot compete with the iron laws of the market. The mode of production claims yet another victim.

What Verhoeven gets at throughout the film is the absurdity of life, its joys and sadnesses, its inescapable realities and the freedom we find and lose in negotiating our existences and those of our loved ones. Unlike the traditional screwball romantic comedy, the film lacks any sense that bizarreness or otherness successfully intrude into the everyday—indeed, the everyday disciplines and destroys whatever small Eden these two try to build. Rather he suggests that life is what it is: a collection of thises-and-thats that builds us up and destroy us.

Is there any salvation here? No. I wouldn’t call Verhoeven a Christian or even a hedonist. There is no escape. We viewers, however, get the beauty of the film itself, which, like their Eric and Olga’s relationship, provides an escape that, if only temporary, still satisfies.