Coming to a cinema near you:
poster for Kurtlar Vadisi - Irak
A Hollywood action hero is doing great business in Turkey at the moment. He's played by Chicagoan Billy Zane, probably best known for his role as the thin-lipped cad in Titanic. There's just one surprise: the film in which he stars is violently anti-American.
Zane's villainous US commander, knowingly named "Sam", is the star of Kurtlar Vadisi - Irak (Valley of the Wolves: Iraq), Turkey's most expensive action thriller ever and one which is currently making box-office history in the country. Three million tickets have been sold since the film's release at the beginning of February, reports Reuters, and it is expected that another two million will follow before too long.
"It gave people a chance to let go of their negative feelings against what's been happening in Iraq," Fahri Kaya, a 22-year-old security guard from Istanbul, told the New York Times earlier this week. "They shouted, clapped and cried."
Plenty of negative feelings to vent, obviously enough: though largely fictional, the film replays the abuses in Abu Ghraib, and depicts an incident in 2003 when a group of Turkish special forces, mistaken for insurgents, were arrested by American marines.
Both these events are folded into a plot featuring a Turkish intelligence agent who travels to Iraq to avenge the death of one of his compatriots. He is joined in his mission by a woman who survived a wedding massacre perpetrated by Zane's character - a massacr that pointedly echoes real-life events in Iraq and elsewhere.
As well as packing in the crowds at home, the film is doing good (if more modest business) in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. It's even due to reach the UK in the next few weeks - raising the unlikely prospect that a violent action thriller may become a cult hit among the kind of Bush-detesting audiences who would normally cross an art-house foyer to avoid it.
The English-speaking Turkish press report the waves being made in the US with a certain degree of told-you-so. Zaman points out a connection with TV series 24, which cast Turks as terrorists. Ertugrul Ozkok, writing for Hürriyet, suggests that the fault lies with strained relations between the two countries. Back in the States, meanwhile, the Washington Post opines that US troops should probably avoid watching it. Don't add it to your Jarhead-style DVD collection, in other words, alongside those Apocalypse Nows and Deer Hunters.
And it is difficult not to share the sense that America's cinematic chickens are finally coming home to roost, not just in terms of foreign policy but on celluloid too. Surely it was only a matter of time before the all-purpose, all-American action hero - the kind forged in sweat by Rambo and finessed by musclebound hardmen from Schwarzenegger to Vin Diesel - was seized on by foreign film-makers only too eager to recast the United States as Indian rather than cowboy. Whether your star is a cool-as-ice hero or sociopathic war criminal is, after all, largely a matter of where you put the camera.
But what about the man himself? "I acted in this movie because I'm a pacifist," Zane told Turkish TV, seemingly unfazed at being dubbed "Hanoi Zane" by certain sections of the American press. "I'm against all kinds of war." Not that this stops Media Bistro's Fishbowl LA column from commenting: "We can't wait to see Billy do Fox News to promote it." Neither can we.
