Too much burden lies on the shoulders of Büşra, both the headscarf-wearing heroine and the film of the same name. Director Alper Çağlar’s debut feature, controversial by the very nature of its protagonists in love, had to seek to please conservatives, liberals, film enthusiasts and fans of the original cartoon character on which the movie was based.Despite tackling a delicate social matter, Büşra is, at its core, a tragic love story, offering a Romeo and Juliet, Kate and Leo or Bella and Edward for Turkey’s young masses. So, basically, they should be the final judges of the movie’s success. But there is a slight problem here: The film is quite confused about its target demographic. While younger audiences will relate to some of the characters, their botched depictions will probably make it hard for the movie to resonate as a love story in the long run.
The headscarf has been a symbol of polarization in Turkey’s recent political history, becoming much more than a fashion choice with the infringement on freedoms to wear it in certain public places, the most controversial one being the country’s universities. Certain liberals who fear Turkey becoming another Iran have made the headscarf the symbol of the ultimate threat to the nation’s secular regime.
These fear-mongers have equated genuine practicing Muslims with Shariah-inclined radical pro-Islamists. With this in mind, Büşra becomes a very brave attempt at bringing together two social worlds separated in Turkey, those of Islamist conservatives and fear-mongering liberals. The words of co-writer Bahadır Boysal, the creator of the original cartoon character, ring true in this respect: “Why wasn’t such a film made before? Why are we the first ones to have done it?”
But though director and co-writer Çağlar and Boysal’s genuine interest in breaking down certain barriers must be acknowledged, the film doesn’t really accomplish what it sets out to do.
Compelling protagonists, cardboard supporting characters
The story goes like this: Büşra (Mine Kılıç) is a bright young woman who has just graduated from university and has a passion for journalism. For reasons not made clear to viewers, she tries her chances at a liberal newspaper, where she is rejected, audiences are left to assume, because of her headscarf. During that unfortunate meeting with the paper’s editor, though, Büşra briefly encounters the journalist/writer she will end up falling for.
Liberal journalist/novelist Yaman (Tayanç Ayaydın, the 2008 Golden Orange winner for Best Actor) is bitter and cynical about life, obsessed with the existential meanings behind loneliness and has a love/hate relationship with Istanbul, as we see through excerpts from the novel he’s working on. The two later run into one another again (thanks to an impulsive stalking by Büşra), and fall into an against-the-grain relationship.
To emphasize the different worlds they come from, we are introduced to Büşra’s family, the man she is set to wed through an arranged marriage and Yaman’s girlfriend and friends. At this point, the movie begins failing to deliver on its well-intended promise, introducing cardboard characters and four-decade-old clichés. While Büşra is a living, breathing character with millions of dilemmas running through her head, suffocating her between what she has been taught is right and what her heart tells her, her family’s presence remains almost negligible throughout the movie.
Anarchist gone mellow
Yaman’s New Age yoga instructor girlfriend is similarly such an irritating cliché that her scenes bring the movie to its lowest points. In the middle of heated arguments, she delivers lines that seem to come not from a real person but from mediocre self-help books, saying things such as “Let’s meditate” or “Inner peace comes from acceptance.”
In Çağlar and Boysal’s world, both conservatives and liberals are evil forces in society, and only Büşra and Yaman have found an escape, in each others’ arms. The beautifully shot scene where Büşra goes to a Halloween party with Yaman and his friends clearly shows the writers’ deeply rooted contempt for a certain group of liberals. The scene is a PG version of the infamous orgy in Eyes Wide Shut. While just an evening out at a modest pub with well-written dialogue could have shown the different worlds the two live in, we’re instead let into Yaman’s world through a costume party with evil girlfriends drugging an innocent girl.
In Boysal’s cartoons, Büşra was an anarchist at heart, a party girl who wore the headscarf as a choice. Here, for understandable reasons, she’s transformed into a victim of society’s norms. A tragic ending is almost necessary in such separated worlds. In the movie, however, the tragedy doesn’t come from obstacles that couldn’t be overcome, from social and familial pressures, but just from bad luck.
Büşra has its heart in the right place, and its creators should be appreciated for their bravery in entering into uncharted territory. But that still doesn’t save the film from being a half-baked attempt.
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