by Douglas Messerli
Harun Baysan and Çetin Kurt (screenplay), Harun Baysan (director) Akif
/ 2018 [30 minutes]
It’s somewhat difficult to know how to feel about Turkish director
Harun Baysan’s 30-minute film Akif since the film’s central character,
Akif is a slightly homophobic draft dodger who wants to use the possibility of
being gay as a way to escape the military.
Akif (Bekir Behrem)
certainly has good reason. His father (Yusuf Eksi) is seriously ill and has no
one else to care for him, being unable to even eat without the careful ministrations
of his only child. In fact, Akif has previously saved up to join the
military—soldiers in the Turkish military, at least at the time of this film,
must serve six months without pay.
The culture, moreover, which does allow gay
men to serve in the military (just as was long true of the US and numerous
other countries’ militia), encourages men who will not or cannot serve to seek
the escape of being gay. But what that entails, the creation of a stereotypical
view of LGBTQ people, is even more terrifying. As the true hero of this work,
Ugur (Uzay Gökhan Irmak) explains to Akif, in order to prove one’s own sexual
orientation one has to create a notion of homosexuality that has little to do
with the reality. And once he has been declared gay, many job opportunities are
lost and the people at large are likely to despise him, as we have already
heard a grocer speaking to a customer of Ugar. Ugur was a school teacher
without a job.
It is to Ugur that Akif
turns to help him in what is basically a “gay makeover.” But, in this case,
Ugu—who identifies as a gay man, but might be described in his manner of dress
and behavior as a transsexual—demands that Akif first learn everything he can
about gay culture, assigning him basic gay texts such as the works of Oscar
Wilde and E. M. Forster’s Maurice and requiring him to watch a number of
openly gay movies.
But in Akif’s world even
being seen publicly with Ugur is dangerous, and in his attempts to buy the
underground tapes, he is discouraged by the seller, forcing him to explain that
he is buying them for a brother attending the university, yet another ironic
level of this hostile cultural milieu in which men like Ugur must live.
After reading and watching
to assimilate some basics, Ugar insists that Akif apply lipstick and makeup and
put on heels (that look a lot like Dorothy’s ruby slippers in The Wizard of
Oz) to help him learn to walk more effeminately, a requirement if he is to
behave as authorities expect him to as a gay man. One scene of the straight
Akif putting on lipstick and eyeliner is so sad that it almost brings tears to
one’s eyes. Even if he were a macho S&M gay man, it is a requirement to
prove one’s homosexuality.
It is at this point that the mild and passive Akif finally balks, demonstrating his own heteronormative cultural assimilation, insisting that Ugar’s entire efforts have been aimed at getting him to have sex, and, in the very worst of assaults, insisting that Ugar is after all still just a faggot!
Ugar spits in is face,
orders him out of the house, and demands that Akif never return.
The very next day, Akif is
fired from his job, his boss having been contacted reporting that Akif is a
drat dodger, which no business is allowed to keep on their payroll.
With no way out, Akif
returns to Ugar and goes through the “ordeal,” spitting out the semen and
almost vomiting much in the manner of Fergus in Neil Jordan’s The Crying
Game (1992) upon discovering that his lover is actually a transgender male.
Ugar himself sits waiting
for the ordeal to end, also in tears.
Yet Ugar’s lessons and,
evidently, the photo succeed. Akif is declared unfit for military duty, which
probably will also make him now even more unhireable and a general outcast in
his society.
He and Ugar hug.
The mixed feelings I have
about this film must certainly emanate in part from my own experience of being
called up for military service for the Vietnam War in 1970. Howard and I were
already a couple, and even as a gay man I was terrified that I might not be
able to convince them that I was gay, an “out” provided by the misconceptions
of US culture that LGBTQ men and women were undesirable because they were
simply less capable and were subject to blackmail—the deep irony of which was that
only in a closed, unaccepting culture which their attitude helped shape, might
one have to worry about being blackmailed for being gay. I must have fit the all
the psychologist’s preconceptions of what a gay might be, for upon reporting
that I was gay, he handed a 4F rating, declaring me unfit for military duty. I
was relieved, but angry at the same time that those gay men and women who might
have wanted to serve might also be declared unfit just because of their
sexuality. I felt my sexuality had saved my life, but at the same time it had
declared me unable to fully participate in the culture.
Akif, knowing now that he
is a marked man, begins to laugh before falling into tears. I might have begun
to cry before, realizing the irony of the situation, I began to laugh. I felt
freed; whereas Akif knows that he is now imprisoned in an identity that has nothing
to do with him. Of course, so was I.
Los Angeles, June 13, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).
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