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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
"Turkish Delight" launched not just Verhoeven's career but two others. Its star, the sneeringly sensual Rutger Hauer, would repeatedly play Verhoeven's tormented protagonists before going on to numerous character roles in Hollywood, and its cinematographer, Jan de Bont, would himself become a leading action filmmaker with movies like "Speed" and "Twister." But none of this future is visible in "Turkish Delight": It is very much a film of its anarchic place and time, suggesting that Verhoeven was becoming a chronicler of unsettled post-'60s Europe, a peer of Bernardo Bertolucci ("Last Tango in Paris" had appeared the previous year), Wim Wenders and Bertrand Blier.
Hauer plays Eric, a brutal and self-destructive Amsterdam Casanova -- the first sex scene occurs within 30 seconds of the opening credits -- struggling to recover from the duplicitous ex-wife who provoked him to violence and then dumped him. When he meets his faithless Olga again, he discovers she still loves him, but she promptly dies of a brain tumor. While the film is clearly the work of an imaginative director eager to take risks, it is fatally undisciplined, and driven by nearly naked anger and pain. Its net effect is something like "Last Tango" mixed with "Love Story," and, as that might suggest, it sometimes seems like an embarrassing relic of the free-love era. The fact that the Netherlands Film Festival last year named it the best Dutch film of the century tells us more about the state of Dutch cinema, I'm afraid, than about the enduring merits of "Turkish Delight."
As Olga, Monique van de Ven was the first of Verhoeven's fetishistically presented female characters, although not quite the finished product. Certainly lovely and at least as willing to get naked as Stone and Elizabeth Berkley would be in later films, van de Ven at first has a gauzy, indeterminate beauty with faint earth-mother, Thai-stick overtones. When Olga reappears late in the film, pretending to be flirtatious and self-confident while hiding her illness from Eric, she has temporarily metamorphosed into a steely, feline, slightly trashy blond. This is the Temptress in her true form.
Whether dirt-poor (Renie Soutendijk in "Spetters") or fabulously rich (Stone in "Basic Instinct"), the Temptress is a tough, calculating girl from the wrong side of the tracks who has made her own way and plays with men like a cat with a wounded mouse. She does so not out of cruelty but because it's her nature, her mode of existence, her method of survival. Men are drawn to her even though they know better; they participate almost eagerly in their own destruction. You could argue that Verhoeven's real subject is the corrosive nature of male desire, and in that regard the Temptress is an instrument rather than an end in herself. Perhaps she is a misogynist stereotype, but as I said earlier, in Verhoeven's case -- as with the similar Kim Novak ice-blond worshipped by Hitchcock -- it's the product of a genuine obsession, not an arty affectation.
"Turkish Delight" was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film -- surely the closest its director will ever come to holding an Oscar -- and immediately made Verhoeven the best-known filmmaker in a small country that had been long ago shoved off the world stage. Holland's cultural coffers were essentially thrown open to him, and he reunited Hauer and van de Ven for "Keetje Tippel," a costume drama about a 19th-century family who forces its daughter into prostitution. After that came more international acclaim for "Soldier of Orange," and then, in 1980, "Spetters," which introduced a new version of the Temptress and marked the beginning of the end of Verhoeven's Dutch period.
"Spetters" (the word means what it sounds like, spatters of paint) is a modestly engaging disaffected-youth picture in the "Saturday Night Fever" vein, but its real importance lies in the many germs it contains that sprout in Verhoeven's later work. It puts Iggy Pop's song "Lust for Life" to ironic use as a party song 17 years before "Trainspotting," and the highly enjoyable punk-disco soundtrack also features ABBA's "Chiquitita" and Blondie's "Heart of Glass." Following the misadventures of a group of hapless teens in a provincial Dutch town, it eventually settles its focus on Fientje (Soutendijk), the bitchy blond who sells fries and meat pies out the window of a roach coach.
Like the character of Christine in "The Fourth Man" and Catherine in "Basic Instinct," Fientje destroys men without realizing how or why she does so. Her first lover is a budding motorcycle champion who is paralyzed in an accident and then kills himself, the first of several such crippling or transfiguring incidents in Verhoeven films. Her next lover has the money to take her away but is brutally raped (by Fientje's brother, no less) and turns gay. As far as I know, this is the first appearance of the homoerotic obsessions that play out in "The Fourth Man" and "Basic Instinct," and it's fair to say that in Verhoeven's world homosexuals are no more dysfunctional or morally ambiguous than anybody else.
All the Temptresses after van de Ven look more or less alike -- and have their blond tresses packed into about the same tightly controlled style -- but Fientje especially seems like a prototype in looks and manner for Nomi of "Showgirls." In both films Verhoeven tries to penetrate an alien world and make sense of it, whether Las Vegas showrooms or motocross racing. Fientje and Nomi are both immoral figures by the standards of conventional society, but emerge from the violence and depravity of their surroundings essentially unscathed, ready to move on and find their fortunes elsewhere.
In "RoboCop," a satire of the vapid American media and the Reagan-era fervor for privatization, Verhoeven captures the dystopian hysteria of the late '80s with a newcomer's acuteness. Peter Weller gives a fine performance as the ordinary policeman killed and reborn as the Christ-like RoboCop, who, like all Verhoeven heroes, is tortured by love. But without a Temptress to focus on, the film lacks the passion of the director's best work, and the effects, dazzling in 1987, are far less so today.
Obviously, I also have to bring up "Total Recall" (1990), Verhoeven's most commercially successful film to date and, not coincidentally, his most impersonal. It's full of brilliant images and groundbreaking effects; with it, Verhoeven established what he could do with the budgets given to A-list fantasy filmmakers like Burton and Scott. The story, about a man whose real memories have been catastrophically erased and replaced with fictions, is well suited to his temperament. But in Arnold Schwarzenegger he had a star who makes all material his own and who is incapable of demonstrating suffering. How exactly do you humiliate Schwarzenegger? Finding no answer to that question, the director could do nothing to make "Total Recall" a Verhoeven film.
"Total Recall" did, of course, accomplish something important: It introduced Verhoeven to Sharon Stone. Fans of either of these devious characters will eternally regret that they didn't reunite for a long-rumored project about the Marquis de Sade, in which Stone was to play the legendary libertine's baleful mother. Relations between Stone and Verhoeven on the set of "Basic Instinct" were reportedly tempestuous, but what can you expect? ("I hated her as much as I loved her," Verhoeven has said.)
