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Turkish Delight

Play trailer Poster for Turkish Delight R 1973 1h 40m Drama Romance Play Trailer Watchlist
Watchlist Tomatometer Popcornmeter
86% Tomatometer 7 Reviews 79% Popcornmeter 1,000+ Ratings
A young woman (Monique van de Ven) offers a ride to a hitchhiking sculptor (Rutger Hauer) and embarks upon a difficult romance with him.

Critics Reviews

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Jas Keimig The Stranger (Seattle, WA) 12/09/2021
It's a delightfully freaky pre-American mega-fame film... Go to Full Review
John Mahoney Los Angeles Free Press 12/11/2019
Okay, the film is flawed - excessive, even unstable. So what? It never loses its balance. It is also fresh, liberated, oddly touching and wholly convincing. Go to Full Review
David Nusair Reel Film Reviews 01/27/2014
2/4
...a wisp of a movie that suffers from an almost total dearth of memorable elements... Go to Full Review
Cole Smithey ColeSmithey.com 12/12/2005
5/5
Seeing is believing. Go to Full Review
Emanuel Levy EmanuelLevy.Com 06/19/2005
3/5
Ken Hanke Mountain Xpress (Asheville, NC) 08/23/2002
4/5
A reminder that Verhoeven actually made good movies back in Holland Go to Full Review
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Audience Reviews

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Scott M 11/10/2024 First film by Verhoeven is fairly dull. Lacks adhesive storyline. All over the place in terms of story. Rutger Hauer is good though. See more cinephile f 11/13/2022 Wow! Verhoeven's first big hit is beautiful and very different from any romantic film that I've seen before. To warn anyone, it's very adult and certainly not for anyone under 18 (really under 25.) I left the film saying to myself "I've never seen anything like that before." It's very different from American films and I recommend 200%. It's absolutely gorgeous. A raw artistic masterpiece! See more júlio a 04/25/2022 Filme super erótico. Com atuações que me fazem questionar se gostei ou não do filme. No geral é muito bom. See more William L 09/26/2021 In a tumultuous love story that intentionally subverts the moral standards that polite sociey holds relationships to (polite pecks on the cheek in public, happily ever afters, gently growing gray on a porch), Turkish Delight breaks a convention that truly should be inviolable - how to eat a banana. You can go from the top, from the bottom, peel it halfway and use it as a handle, but you can't cut it in half and eat it with a spoon. Humanity has come too far for that sort of insanity. This early work from Paul Verhoeven is an interesting one, depicting a relationship that is refreshingly honest (two characters playing up the attributes of youthful romance while coming to terms with far uglier aspects of life - disease, dishonesty, and death among them); both van de Ven and Hauer bring a lot of energy to their respective roles, creating an unstable chemistry. There is definitely a tangible sense of excitement and volatility, but there is also a general feeling of repetitiveness to the actual events of the film; whenever Verhoeven gets too close ot conventional dramatic territory, he whips out an emotional outburst or (quite often) intermittent nudity. Just because you're allowed to get away with showing Rutger Hauer's penis, doesn't mean it deserves its own billing. Furthermore, attributing Olga's erratic behavior to a brain tumor does also seem to take away a bit of the sense of sincerity associated with the relationship, as the close intimacy we are privy to could be attributed toward an actual psychological problem rather than character. The base plot has been done before, but its the particular treatment of the relationship between the two leads that allowed Turkish Delight to become "the most successful film in the history of Dutch cinema". (3.5/5) See more 10/13/2019 The dynamic between Rutger Hauer Monique van de Ven is amazing in this film. See more 11/14/2016 It's wild. It's heartbreaking. It's Verhoeven. See more Read all reviews
Turkish Delight

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Movie Info

Synopsis A young woman (Monique van de Ven) offers a ride to a hitchhiking sculptor (Rutger Hauer) and embarks upon a difficult romance with him.
Director
Paul Verhoeven
Producer
Rob Houwer
Screenwriter
Gerard Soeteman
Rating
R
Genre
Drama, Romance
Original Language
Dutch
Runtime
1h 40m