Yazi Tura/Toss Up (2004) is directed by Ugur Yucel, a leading theater and film actor in Turkey. The film was shown and recognized in numerous international film festivals. Through distinct yet connected narratives, the film centers around two main characters that have recently returned from serving their army duty in the South East region of Turkey where there is an ongoing conflict with the Kurdish forces in the region. Through the telling of two stories, in the first story, Ridvan becomes crippled during the war and Cevher, the main character of the second story, looses his hearing in one ear. The film poignantly portrays their interrelated stories and depicts their struggle to return back and adjust to their everyday lives after the war. Through depicting the arduous rehabilitation process that the two characters go through the film offers a piercing commentary on the Kurdish issue, war, and the crisis in masculinity.

One of the first things worth mentioning about the film Toss Up (Yazi Tura) (2004) is that it is an angry film; it is a film that does not hesitate to share its anger. Toss Up is a film that tells a story without hesitating to narrate this story dramatically, or even melodramatically. One gets the sense that the film shares the anger of its main characters without providing the spectator a distance or a respite. In fact, it is a film that weaves this anger and tension into its very mode of story telling. Curiously, Toss Up is not a film attracts and involves the spectator by offering surprises in the storyline or plot. Rather, like the film Solino (Fatih Akin, 2002), there is not mystery involved in the in the sense storyline whose purpose is to puzzle and thus attract the attention of the viewer. On the contrary, the film employs a style of filmmaking that allows the viewer to sense and foretell how the dramatic events will unravel before they happen. We know that Toss Up will have a sad ending (just like we know that Solino will have a sad ending); we can even guess what these endings are. This predictability does not take away from the film; rather it adds value by shifting the spectatorial attention to the aesthetic staging of the scenes and the intricacies of the dialogue in the film. After all, our relationship with the war in the Southeast region of Turkey mirrors the relationship that spectators develop vis-à-vis the film: we know how things will end and yet we know nothing of that end’s unraveling.

At times, we can even guess the dialogue and discern how the dialogue offers us the keys to the tragedy that will reveal itself at the end of each story. However, despite that every utterance in the film conveys a piece of that tragedy, Toss Up denies up the pleasure of the surprise. Everything is known and nothing is a surprise. With a Lars Von Trierien sense of fatalism, the film introduces the story as inevitable in a society and a country such as ours. As a result, a link is established between the segmented symbolism of the opening scene (a gun flying in the air, etc.) and the “tragedy” unraveling at the end of the film. It is the dialogue that hinges this link, which carries the weight of the film. If one were to excise any portion of the dialogue from the film, the whole itself might collapse. Again, everything is inevitably connected and the viewer knows everything. It is here that the dialogue exchanged between Ridvan, one of the main characters, and his friends in the film Firuz and Sencer becomes legible. After hearing from Ridvan the war traumas that he had gone through, Firuz and Sencer exclaim, “ Do you reckon the things he says are true? The fellow has lost it. I know the girl he is talking about is still alive but there is a truth-value to what he says too. Devran was involved with terror….” Firuz and Sencer know everything too. And the story Ridvan tells, whether it actually happened or not, whether it is real or not, somehow it touches them. Whether it exists or whether it is merely a ghost haunting Ridvan, it touches Firuz and Sencer. It touches us all.

A “Delikanli” Never Cries

It makes sense to view Yazi Tura (2004) as a film that keeps up with the filmmaking tradition put forth by films such as Eskiya (Yavuz Turgul, 1996) Gemide (Serdar Akar, 1999) and Laleli’de Bir Azize (Kudret Sabanci, 1998). If talking about a tradition as such obscures more than it illuminates, we can then maybe suggest that the film continues something that was started in these particular films. The common thread here is the exploration of masculinity as a trope that these films attempt to examine and scrutinize. Masculinity as a leitmotif that is salient not only to these films but to Turkey as a whole. Framing masculinity as a central discourse, Yazi Tura contribution lies in interrogating the nexus of war and manhood exposing a deep crisis in masculinity. This interrogation is facilitated by fluency the director of Yazi Tura alongside other directors such as Sedar Akar, Kudret Sabanci, in the vernacular culture of manhood in Beyoglu and its surrounding areas (the region where the film takes place). These directors capitalize on their knowledge of these local contexts to read a society through its language of manliness and vocabulary of masculinity. Whether these directors take a critical stance vis-à-vis this language of masculinity is a debatable issue. However, in all these films words and expressions such as “delikanli” (crazy-blooded- a common expression used while referring to an exemplary masculine man), “erkek Adam” (a manly man), and motifs such as knife, blade, beard, hair, Swiss army knife take center stage. Even if these directors’ explorations of masculinity do not take an explicit self-critical approach (although I believe that such an approach is present in the films), we can say that these particular directors know what is at stake in signifiers like “delikanli;” and they are successful in demonstrating the hypocrisies and instabilities involved in a “delikanli” moral order. At this point we can mention a segment from the film where we can see how the friendship based on masculinity and being a “delikanli” as an ideal form of that masculinity serves as a bond that cements the friendship between the characters Sencer and Ridvan but also, as the storyline develops (Sencer running away with the girl Ridvan is in love with), it ends up being oppressive. There is, in this sense, a strong connection between the main character in the first story, Ridvan, who is trying to get married through hiding his crippled leg and Cevher, the main character of the second story in the film, who is trying to find his place in his society through hiding his emotions. Both have expectations from the culture of valorizes “delikanli” as a coveted form of manliness. The irony is that it is this very same culture with its iterations of masculinity that precipitates both characters’ tragic fate.

Another film within the series of film that explore the intersection of nation and manhood is Gemide (2002). The film plays with metaphors of the nation through showcasing what happened in the ship-, a metaphor for the Turkish nation- where a bunch of men are trying to prove their masculinity to each other. In this film we see how masculinity and potency are equated with aggressively winning over a woman becomes the epitome of manliness and the main character of the film eagerly learns the lesson that it is a matter of survival on the ship (in the country) for him to demonstrate his masculinity (although he is blonde and weaker than the others, he is “less of a man”). In this respect, it is very significant that Yazi Tura begins with the story of the character (Olgun Simsek) that ends up crippled after the war. We get to witness a character that lost his hope for love during the war and who tries to re-establish his power within his own nation. Thus, I find it significant that in the film, Ridvan, never says, “I love you” to the girl he plans to marry, nor does he display any form of compassion. We, the viewers, do not see any expression of love on his face. This is due to the fact that he is not in love with the girl he wants to marry. (The term “love” is erased from his mind, love can only appear to him as a ghost) His only aspiration is to gain back the power that he lost with the loss of his leg through the conquest of the girl. Here, it is clear that power is equated with masculinity. This masculine power defines his country. It is the same country that has sent him to war in the Southeast to valiantly demonstrate his masculinity, hoping that he will destroy and invade. There in the Southeast, he looses his ability to love. Now he only can come across love in the shape of a ghost.

In this context, it is clear why statements in the film such as “You come only if you are a man”, “You are a man and I am a queer” are significant. In the film, the tragedy of the crippled character (Ridvan) who lost his sense of manhood through loosing his leg is overshadowed by the tragedy of the second main character (Cevher) who despite his strength, prowess and “delikanli” attitude, faces the same tragic end. In this sense, perhaps, the character, Cevher, in the second story, plays a more significant role. He reflects the culture of the repressing one’s emotions in order to prove one’s masculinity in a patriarchal society. We see our own reflection in each scene where Cevher gets teary-eyed and forces himself to not hug his older brother who is both Greek and gay. We watch the conflict between the values that a patriarchal society imposes on its subjects (And, yes Kenan Imirzaloglu plays this character really well). Phrases such as: “If someone tricks you, you have to make them pay back”, “If you are a real man, you will use your knife”, “you will punch back however punches you” and “”You will order those who order you” reverberate in Cevher’s deaf ear. The loss of hearing is a price for the gain in masculinity; and the deaf ear becomes the center of a new struggle. Furthermore, When Cevher witnesses his brother getting beaten, his sense of masculinity leads him to a kill a man with his knife, which leaves him ending up in prison. He is guided by an insider voice that possesses him and tells him “If you are a man you will not hesitate to use your knife.”

And he cries. He, of course, does not cry when the cops capture him. Does a “manly man” ever cry? But we know he cries. His brother does not see him cry but we, the viewers, see him cry. He does not cry in front of the cops or in front of his brother. He cannot cry in front of someone from another country, it is not manly to do so. He cannot cry next to the authorities since they are themselves who institutionalize the no crying rule of the game of “manly men. But he cries, regardless. Right after his brother tells him “You are a man and I am a queer”, right after he tries to, for the last time, to exhibit his masculinity by chugging a bottle of whiskey. He goes somewhere where no one can see him, somewhere far he cries there. This country cries as well but no one sees it. Perhaps we see do see it. Just like Ridvan who lost a leg, or like Cevher who lost his hearing, did we also loose an eye? Are we blind? Or can our other eye still see a man crying.

Bio:

Firat Yucel is a prominent film critic in Turkey. He is the chief editor of Altyazi Monthly Cinema Magazine in Turkey. This piece was previously published in Turkish in Altyazi.

Ekin Yasin is a first year M.A student at the Anthropology Department at Columbia University. Yasin has completed an M.A at New York University’s Kevorkian Center in Near Eastern Studies. She works on forms of religious media and their dissemination in Turkey.