Youth culture in global cinema

166 youth and inner-national conflict
matic text is the achievement of heterosexual romance through a deal between
the economic might of the upper class and the authentic culture of the
lower class, Islamic films have a general tendency to depict upper-class characters
as being in search of something beyond their decadent life. In other
words, they enact the Pygmalion story, common in popular melodramas, in
reverse.
In such a search, Feyza makes a bet about one of her friends, a classmate
of Bilal, that she will make him come to her birthday party and dance
at the party. Romance is laid out in romantic comedy fashion; movement
toward the climax of play—the birthday party scene—is slowly constructed
through the cultural clash between Bilal and Feyza. Yet the contrast is offset
by Feyza’s interest in Ottoman court music and her love for her grandmother,
who wears the headscarf and prays continuously. So Feyza’s self is
divided between an upper-class, westernized look (makeup, perfume, music,
dancing) and a traditional, lower-class one (simplicity, her grandmother’s traditional
attire). Feyza’s divided self is thus the battleground, and eventually
her playful side gives way to her other self, which is enlightened by Islam.
This is a slow process, in which Feyza first covers her head with a hat and
then with a headscarf, and then she begins to wear properly modest clothing.
However, the birthday party changes everything: first Bilal proposes marriage
and Feyza accepts, but then Feyza’s friends tell Bilal about the plot. As
Bilal leaves, despite Feyza’s deep apologies, the melodrama heightens. Feyza
marries a rich businessman who turns out to be a gambler and a criminal;
Bilal marries a lower-class woman. Feyza later gets a divorce and devotes
herself to religion and to her daughter, while Bilal’s happy life comes to an
end with the death of his wife, who leaves him alone with his son. Years
after Feyza’s enlightenment and her pursuit of a simple life, which she creates
without any support from her family, her daughter coincidentally meets
Bilal’s son, who has become a doctor and treats Feyza. Before her death, Feyza
sees her daughter married to Bilal’s son, and thus the rift between Feyza and
Bilal is healed. The melodramatic narrative of this film comes in part from
the novel, partly from the director’s long history as an assistant director in
Yeşilçam, and also from the scriptwriter, Bülent Oran, who wrote several
hundred popular film scripts.
It is not surprising that the filmmakers who produced Gençlik Köprüsü
claimed that they had eschewed the trappings of popular cinema in order to
make a genuine Islamic film. Their critical attitude toward popular cinema
also involved an attempt to revolutionize the filmic environment in Turkey,
echoing the discourse of leftist filmmakers and critics. The film was directed
by Salih Diriklik, but it was written and made possible by a wider group