Recep Ivedik - Review

Directory of World Cinema

Recep I˙vedik Recep I˙vedik Studio:

Aksoy Film Özen Film Director:

Togan Gökbakar Producers:

Faruk Aksoy Mehmet E. Soyarslan Ays¸e Germen Screenwriters:

S¸ahan Gökbakar Serkan Altunig˘ne Cinematographer:

Ertunç S¸enkay Editor:

Erkan Özekar Duration:

110 Minutes Cast:

S¸ahan Gökbakar Fatma Toptas¸ Tülug˘ Çizgen Year:

2008

134  Turkey

Synopsis The film starts at a police station in the suburbs of I˙stanbul. Recep, a thirty-something drifter, is released from prison after a fight with the police. On his way home he sees a man dropping his wallet and picks it up. He later sees the owner of the wallet on the television as a hotel manager in Antalya. He decides to go to Antalya to personally deliver the wallet. On his journey, he camps at night, hitchhikes during the day. When he arrives at Antalya and hands the wallet back, the owner of the hotel, impressed by his honesty, offers him a week-long vacation for free. During his stay, Recep is enchanted by Sibel, who has a rich fiancé – a relationship imposed upon her by her overprotective mother. Not knowing about her engagement, Recep tries all sorts of things and at the end manages to win her heart. They realize they used to know each other from their childhood years but, because Sibel promises her dying mother that she will marry her fiancé, she cannot follow Recep. As he leaves she realizes her strong feelings for him, but it is a little too late.

Critique Recep I˙vedik has been more than a blockbuster; it has turned into a cultural phenomenon. The film was made for a small sum, less than a million dollars, but grossed to be the greatest box-office winner to date. After the success of the film, S¸ahan Gökbakar, playing the famous lead character, made two sequels. His famous lines created what we can call a subculture. Recep was loved by millions, his laughing voice became a ring tone in cell phones and he even had an iPhone application quoting his lines. Recep I˙vedik as a character embraces the cultural diversity and problems of dislocated immigrant rural youths living in the suburbs of big cities. He is uneducated, unemployed, vulgar yet honest, modest, friendly and with some common sense and the belief that he can win the day. In many ways, he could be called the Turkish Borat, but Recep is more than that. Although there is toilet humour in the film, the character is way more complex and three–dimensional, as it had been developed on television shows years before. In fact, the Recep I˙vedik character was already famous due to television quiz shows where he appeared as a cameo and made fun of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. That episode was put on YouTube and reached millions of potential film viewers. Recep can also be a childlike figure and his actions are based on instant gratification of an ego that defies all social mores. The film is a teen’s dream come true: women on the road waiting to be rescued (though this image can be rather problematic), partying with rockers and clubbers, enjoying a vacation in a five-star hotel and meeting your childhood sweetheart once again. Recep is a version of the common man making it big time. The film is directed by S¸ahan Gökbakar’s brother, Togan, a university-trained director who is technically proficient and well aware of the film traditions before him (and sometimes alluding to

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them). Recep is also very inventive with language. He can speak, even sing, in different Anatolian dialects. He has folk-tale character attributes like Kelog˘lan. He also continually makes popular-culture references to Turkish pop music. Recep I˙vedik can appeal to rich and poor, old and young, uneducated and the elite at the same time. In fact, this quality – its ability to reach across all class, gender and cultural background – gave it the right to claim the title of ‘the best film to cut across all audience segments at the box office’ in Turkish cinema.

Murat Akser

Recep I˙vedik 2 Recep I˙vedik 2 Studio:

Aksoy Film Özen Film Director:

Togan Gökbakar Producers:

Faruk Aksoy Mehmet E. Soyarslan Screenwriters:

Togan Gökbakar S¸ahan Gökbakar Serkan Altunig˘ne Cinematographer:

Ertunç S¸enkay Editor:

Erkan Özekan Music:

Og˘uz Kaplangı Duration:

110 Minutes Cast:

S¸ahan Gökbakar Gülsen Özbakan Efe Babacan Çag˘rı Büyüksayar Zeynep Çamcı Asiye Dinçsoy Year:

Synopsis Recep is in his home neighbourhood in Güngören, I˙stanbul, where he visits his grandmother. His grandmother is an energetic and lively woman. She complains about Recep’s idle ways. Grandmother orders Recep to find a job, get married, get a good reputation and be a good man. Recep starts looking for a job. First he becomes a pizza delivery man but he gets fired for eating half of the orders. Then he becomes a cashier in a supermarket. He gets fired again for ordering the customers around. Next, he works in a pharmacy and then becomes an air steward. He is fired 17 times in 20 days. He discovers that his cousin Hakan runs an ad agency created by his grandfather. He goes to the ad agency to claim his senior-partner position. After he has made several embarrassing scenes at the office he gets acquainted with the employees. To achieve his second goal, he befriends an internet junkie and finds about dating sites. He creates a dating profile and has his first date at a Starbucks. He mistakes another girl for his date and gets pepper-sprayed. On the business front, he decides to represent the agency in a deal with a Japanese company. He comes to the meeting with a kimono that has a yakuza symbol on and manages to deal. Even though all goes well for him on the job front, he cannot find love. Yet, in order to fulfil the promise he gave to his grandmother on her death bed, he takes one of the interns who works for him and presents her as his girlfriend. At the end of the film we see Recep sitting alone crying next to his grandmother’s coffin.

Critique The sequel to the incredibly successful Recep I˙vedik comes with a bigger budget and a more developed story. We get to see Recep (S¸ahan Gökbakar) in his own neighbourhood, where he is everybody’s best friend. In the film, Recep’s characters and actions are criticized by his grandmother, who represents authority and provides social criticism. He faces the challenging task faced by young men in the big city: finding a job. As Recep puts it, ‘this is the problem of 18 million unemployed youths’. In line with this, the film makes fun of business practices and capitalist ideology, particularly through Recep’s jokes. Recep’s success as a newcomer to an old

2009 Blockbusters in Turkish Cinema 135