The Cemil Show

The Cemil Show is a bitter piece of candy. In its shiny, colourful universe, the film depicts events with a cartoonish exaggeration, yet the pain and blood of its characters are quite real. It takes place where personal dreams clash with the realities of life. Or let’s say, where unrealised dreams turn into a toxic obsession. As the famous song goes, the film deals with ‘a case of do or die’.

Cemil, a mall security guard, is not much of a doer, actually. Most of the time, he’s ‘the man who wasn’t there’, living in his head, in his fantasies. This life in his mind is very much tied to Yeşilçam (a sobriquet referring to the old Turkish film industry), especially to its 1970s action movies and a (fictitious) legendary villain actor: Turgay Göral. Handsome, ruthless, an unapologetic betrayer and a man of great willpower, Göral is everything that Cemil is not. But our hero desperately wants to play the lead in the remake of one of his movies, Kâbus (Nightmare). The Cemil Show’s story is intricately intertwined with this imaginary film, which is stunningly produced in the sense that it looks exactly like a 70s cult classic that any B-movie fan would love to see. The Cemil Show doesn’t just utilise this element as an entertaining homage, but instead structures it as a parallel narrative mirroring the inner and outer journey of its protagonist. 

What gives The Cemil Show its unexpected flavour is that although it flirts with slapstick and the grotesque, at first kind of resembling mainstream Turkish comedies, towards its climax it reaches an emotional realness through its expressive visual style, making the psychological wounds of its protagonists touchingly visible. When the laughable wannabe actor becomes a ‘wannabe Faust’, when an attempt at practicing method acting turns into a psychosis, a humane drama about handling desires and limitations emerges, while also tackling the issue of the interplay of fiction and reality, and what they serve. How much do you have to act to be yourself, to be real? The answers are different for Cemil and the secondary character, Turgay’s estranged daughter Burcu, who works at the mall’s welcome desk. The fact is, she doesn’t have a welcoming personality and he isn’t guarding anything at all. And the mall is the big, white swamp that swallowed everything that vanished from cultural life in Turkey in the 1980s, including Yeşilçam − and the naivety and connectedness it represented for Turkish society. 

Yesim Tabak is a Turkish film journalist and curator who has served as a jury member at several international film festivals.