Sergeant Shakespeare

posted to www.marxmail.org on October, 20, 2002

While in a writers workshop twenty-five years ago, the instructor made a point that has stuck with me ever since. He said that comedy is much harder to write than straight fiction or drama. When you look at the failed, recent work of Woody Allen, you realize how true this is. This is also confirmed by the repellently misanthropic comedies of the Farrelly brothers ("There's Something About Mary") and their imitators, who are inspired to one extent or another by the Saturday Night Live of today. In this style of comedy, society's losers are subjected to the worst kind of indignity in a postmodern version of medieval bear baiting.

By contrast, Sinan Cetin's 2001 "Komiser Sekspir" (Sergeant Shakespeare), takes the losers in Turkish society and casts them as heroes and heroines, without ever once glossing over their foibles. The ranking officer of a Turkish police station has just learned that his daughter Su (Pelin Batu) lost the lead role in a high-school production of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves." An onset of leukemia has not only caused her to faint repeatedly on stage, it also threatens her life. When Sergeant Cemil (legendary Turkish actor Kadir Ihahir) meets with his daughter's doctor at the hospital, he is informed that medication might have some effect, but she also needs the will to live. Try to figure out what makes her happy, like her favorite food or toys, and then increase it.

For Su, the theater and especially "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" are what makes life worth living. Understanding this, her father resolves to pull together a jailhouse production of the fairy tale starring his ailing daughter. After watching the histrionics of a young prisoner (Okan Bayulgen), who has just been hauled in for selling heroin, he decides, somewhat quixotically, that the jailhouse can be turned into a theater.

Demanding preferential treatment, the drug dealer has informed his captors that he is none other than "little Hayati", a famous child actor. Kneeling in his jail cell before the bemused jailers, Hayati performs one of his most famous, if not bathetic, scenes-- that of an orphan imploring a kind-hearted stranger to become a surrogate father. While played for laughs, this is basically the leitmotif of the film: the need to bond with a father, even a remote one like Sergeant Cemil.

After Hayati agrees to direct "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," he rounds out the cast with other jailbirds. A glue-sniffer will play the Prince who plants the kiss on the sleeping Snow White. An aging prostitute (the skilled veteran Mujde Ar) will play the Evil Queen. The role of the hunter, who is dispatched by the Evil Queen to kill Snow White, is filled by an unemployed civil servant who was arrested on the streets of Istanbul while walking around with a sign protesting economic injustice. Shortly after rehearsals begin, Sergeant Cemil and Hayati decide to compete in a television show, which awards prizes to the best amateur production of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves."

Eventually Sergeant Cemil becomes less interested in police work and much more in stage production. At the beginning of the film, he is stereotypically cruel to anybody who crosses his path, including a waiter whom he slaps impulsively until the hapless victim cries out that he is there only to bring back some empty plates to the next-door restaurant. This is not the first time that Sinan Cetin has defied conventional progressive thinking in Turkey by making such an authoritarian figure sympathetic.

In his 1999 "Propaganda," Cetin featured a customs officer named Mehdi who has the job of putting barbed wire on the border between Turkey and Syria. Although anxious to carry out his job, he confesses that such measures might not work since "The doctor, the teacher, the whore ... oops, I mean the most important people, live on the other side of town." According to a Montreal Gazette review on October 22, 1999, Cetin presents Mehdi as being neither a puppet nor a power-hungry government official. Like Sergeant Cemil, he is just a family man who wants to raise his family. When challenged by his friends and family, Mehdi desperately tries to defend the state's point of view by explaining that "barbed wire is now the ornamental rim of our country." Cetin uses his compromised main character to convey the idea that bureaucracy and repression are rotten.

Unlike Mehdi, Sergeant Cemil finally breaks free from the repressive state apparatus, even if it is at the expense of his career and a prison term. Surely the transformation of someone like Cemil is unlikely given the exigencies of contemporary Turkey in crisis. For director Sinan Cetin, the vision of a cop being transformed by art is arguably just one step above the fairy tale that he just produced in terms of credulity.

Nevertheless, there is little question that such visions will continue to haunt Turkish directors. Faced with an economically devastated population and a gendarmerie that is assembled to maintain the status quo that produces such desperation, the artist will always dream of alternatives. Indeed, while watching "Sergeant Shakespeare," I was reminded of the Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland vehicles of the late 1930s, especially "Babes in Arms," (http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/Babes_in_Arms.htm ), when penniless teenagers decide to stage a musical in a barn, defying all odds.

Faced with a permanent economic depression, it is inevitable that Turkey will inspire films that combine escapism and hope for a better future.

("Sergeant Shakespeare" is one of the films included in the 4th Annual Turkish Film Festival at the Anthology Film Archives in NYC and will be shown again on Saturday, Oct. 26th at 5pm. A schedule for the entire festival can be found at: http://www.anthologyfilmarchives.org. The Moon and Stars Project, an organization devoted to promoting cultural interaction between the USA and Turkey, has organized the festival. Their website is at: http://www.moonandstarsproject.org/)