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Melodrama

Melodrama

Movie · 1988 · 3 people

İrfan Tözüm directed and produced Melodram (Melodrama), a 1988 Turkish emotional drama, from a screenplay by Macit Koper. It was made by Muhteşem Film.

The story turns on the stalled marriage of Esra, a writer, and Koray, a painter. Whatever Esra tries, she cannot talk her husband out of his drug habit, and she has him hospitalized for treatment, yet Koray's craving for morphine continues. Esra then goes to Behzat, whom she has known since childhood and who looked after her while her father was in prison, to find out who he really is. Her aim is to write about everything she has lived through since childhood, but events do not unfold as she expects and a great chaos begins.

Hülya Avşar plays Esra, Yalçın Dümer the painter Koray, and Macit Koper, the screenwriter, plays Behzat; Muhteşem Tözüm appears as Koray at the age of four. Mehmet Akan, Bülent Oran and Cem Molvan complete the cast. The music is by Önder Focan and Molvan was the cinematographer. Hülya Avşar was dubbed by Müdrike Coşansu, with Mustafa Alabora as dubbing director and Nevzat Çankara as his assistant.

Directorİrfan Tözüm
Production companyMuhteşem Film

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Cast

Also in the cast: Mehmet Akan, Cem Molvan, Muhteşem Tözüm (Koray), Yalçın Dümer (Painter Koray)

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Through different eyes

AI-assisted editorial takes written from different viewer perspectives. They are not reader reviews; those are below.

Yeşilçam Nostalgic A viewer raised on the classics, looking for warm storytelling and strong acting.

This drama from Hülya Avşar's late-eighties film years opens onto a darker world, far from Yeşilçam's warmer periods. A painter struggling with morphine addiction and a writer trying to save him recall the self-sacrificing heroine of the old melodramas, but the subject now has an altogether different harshness. Her return to Behzat, whom she has known since childhood, is a fine trace of the wish to settle accounts with the past. An eye raised on the classics, though, will find itself looking, amid this harshness, for the old films' sense of consolation and moral center.

Cinephile Looks at script, editing and directing choices; keeps a distance from formula films.

The title puts the film's genre up front as a label, which can be read as İrfan Tözüm's intention to play knowingly with melodrama's rules. Macit Koper both writing the screenplay and playing Behzat is an interesting choice: the screenwriter personally embodies the story's doorway into the past. Building a great chaos, with events unravelling unexpectedly, on top of a realistic ground of addiction and marital crisis is risky, though. The genre's heightened language can easily lose credibility when dealing with a subject like addiction, and whether the film can carry its own title as a claim depends on that. So it comes across as a bold experiment with a fragile balance.

History & Society Lens Asks about the period, the social background and what the work reflects.

By unpicking an artist couple's marriage through addiction, the film brings out the responsibility a family crisis places on the woman: it is Esra who has her husband hospitalized and Esra who tries to save him. Behzat, who looked after her while her father was in prison, recalls the protection close acquaintances take on where the family falls short. Esra's wish to put into writing everything she has lived through since childhood can be read as a woman's effort to become the narrator of her own story. Centering on the home of a writer and a painter also opens an interesting window onto the troubles of the artistic middle class in the late eighties.

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