YOUNG TURKS

A few years ago, I saw the 2004 movie Head-On, directed by Fatih Akin. If you haven't seen it, do so. Netflix has it streaming. Hell, see everything you can by Akin. In Head-On, Sibel Kekilli plays a young Turkish woman living in Germany with her overbearing family. She's so sick of them (to the point of suicidal despair) that she convinces an older Turkish guy, played by Birol Ünel, to marry her. He's a dirtbag ex-punk rocker who wants little to do with her and less to do with marriage, seeing as how he's in a psychiatric clinic following his own suicide attempt (he drove his car into a wall, despairing over the death of his first wife). They initially lead separate lives, but gradually fall in love. Then things go bad again. I'm not gonna go into all the chaos that ensues, but there's rape, murder, prison, and much more. It's an amazing movie, one that could easily have become a hammering polemic about conservative Muslim thinking and how it conflicts with the more liberal social atmosphere of Western Europe, but chooses instead to focus on individuals who are themselves, and not mere symbols.

I wish the same were true of When We Leave, a 2010 movie, also about German Turks, and also starring Sibel Kekilli, that I saw this week. In this one, Kekilli (who had a nose job between the two movies, so I wasn't sure it was her until her name popped up onscreen at the end) plays a young Turkish woman who flees her abusive husband in Istanbul, taking their son, and attempts to seek refuge with her family in Germany. Her parents are more concerned with maintaining their status and honor within the community than they are with her happiness or safety, and her older brother is a psychotic thug who beats her, attempts to steal the kid and return him to his father, and is basically starring in a Lifetime movie about the evils of Muslim gender politics. The movie is so melodramatic that from the moment I saw the brother glowering at her across the dinner table, the first night she's back under her parents' roof, I knew he was going to attempt to punish her via "honor killing," and the only questions were how long it would take for the movie to get there, and whether he'd be successful or not. But in between, Kekilli's character does pretty much everything she can to lose the audience's sympathy. She repeatedly attempts to gain her family's support, long after it's obvious to everyone else on Earth that it's not coming (doors are literally slammed in her face—this is not a subtle movie), in the process breaking the rules of the women's shelter she's placed in by the German authorities, she disrupts family gatherings with public displays that wind up dishonoring them even further in the eyes of other Turks...I found myself basically shouting "TAKE THE HINT, STUPID" at the screen about a half dozen times.

So yeah, if you're gonna watch a movie about Turkish immigrants to Germany and their problems, Head-On is the one, and When We Leave is a propagandistic crapfest you can safely avoid.

DOSTOEVSKY: "BITCHES, MAN - WHADDYA GONNA DO?"

I finished reading The Idiot two or three nights ago, after a months-long struggle. There were never any times when I considered just abandoning the thing, but plenty when I thought, "I need to go read something else for a while." I'll admit it; a big part of it was the names. The way Russian names are written out - "Soandso Soandsovich" or "Whatsername Whatsernamova" - really annoys me, but then giving everyone nicknames by which they're also referred to got confusing and irritating at times. Also, because I let long intervals pass during which I'd go read something else, I frequently found myself forgetting who was related to who when I came back to the thing. But that was entirely my fault, and could be easily remedied with a quick trip to Wikipedia.

Another problem I had was just with Dostoevsky's general overwroughtness. How much of this was due to Constance Garnett's translation, and how much of it was due to the book being written in the 19th Century, is hard to say. But people are constantly in what seem to me to be absurdly heightened emotional states—clutching at their hearts, feeling physically ill as a result of some (to my mind) entirely minor social slight or passing remark, etc., etc. It's very weird to submerge yourself in a world like that if, like me, you're someone who tends to ignore all but the most overt conversational/emotional cues.

Ultimately, though, I'm glad I read the book. Not just because of the awesome ending, which I won't spoil but which I totally didn't see coming, but because I feel like Dostoevsky may not have written the book he thought he was writing. It seems to me he set out to satirize social climbers in 19th Century Russia, and he does that ably enough. Whether he successfully created the character of Myshkin is more debatable—the idea that the guy was some sort of innocent, too good for this world, doesn't quite work for me. He really does seem more like someone who's just socially maladjusted, a man who's never been trained in the blithe lies and masquerades that are necessary to navigate any civilized society during any period of human history. But what I think The Idiot is really about, and I'm not sure Dostoevsky meant it to be, is the ways in which bourgeois society drives women insane.

The two primary female characters, Nastassya Filippovna and Aglaia Epanchin, are both out of their minds. They remind me of Jack Nicholson's line from As Good as It Gets about how to write women—"think of a man, and take away reason and accountability." Their capriciousness and weird, ultimately self-destructive displays of pique make me think of an exotic bird bashing its own brains out against the bars of its cage. And the men treat them like alien creatures impossible to comprehend or empathize with, but obsessively loved for reasons that are never quite made clear. I mean, what does Rogozhin even like about Nastassya Filippovna? Does he ever even say? Does Myshkin say why he likes Aglaia? There's so much talking and talking and talking in this book, and yet no one ever lays emotional cards on the table—it's all dancing around social obligations and trying to make sure someone is an acceptable suitor.

It's a weird book. I think I'm gonna have to read it again. In about a decade.

This is the edition I bought, if you want to read it yourself.