The Ban on Fusun Visiting the Pèlür Bar

The Ban on Fusun Visiting the Pèlür Bar was a domestic restriction imposed after Füsun’s encounter with Tahir Tan and the acting offers that followed. Though centered on a single bar, it widened into a short-lived regime governing where she could go and whom she could see, revealing how her film ambitions and personal freedom were constrained by family and marital authority.

Background and Trigger

At the Huzur Restaurant in Tarabya in the summer of 1977, Tahir Tan became besotted with Füsun. Hayal Hayati and Muzaffer Bey offered her film roles; Kemal considered it possible that they did so because they had noticed Tahir’s interest in her. After Tahir backed off, Füsun acknowledged that she had at least encouraged the men. Kemal regarded this as a betrayal, and the episode became the immediate context for the restrictions that followed.

Scope of the Ban

Füsun was barred from the film world’s Beyoğlu haunts, especially the Pelür Bar where Füsun Received an Acting Offer. The restriction was not limited to that venue: Nesibe the seamstress and Tarık Bey were frightened by the episode, and for a time they also limited Füsun’s contact with neighborhood friends. She could not go out without asking her mother’s permission, as though she were still unmarried. Feridun explained these measures to Kemal at the Lemon Films offices and promised that he, too, would stay away from the bar. The account leaves uncertain whether the ban was imposed by Feridun, Tarık Bey, or both; its force lay in the combined authority exercised over Füsun’s movements.

Effects on Füsun and the Film Project

When Kemal next visited, Füsun’s resentment of the restrictions surfaced as sullen fury. The ban and the wider confinement reached into her daily life, while her hoped-for acting career remained blocked: the art film was not ready to pass the censors, and Kemal doubted Feridun could resolve that problem soon. In the back room, Füsun had begun painting a seagull, and she showed Kemal that she understood how painfully uncertain the film’s prospects were. He found her willfulness moving, but usually asked about the painting only when her mood seemed to invite it. Much of the evening instead passed through her angry looks and his effort to decipher them.

Place in the Longer Visits

The restriction arose during the years when Kemal regularly visited Füsun and her family for supper. Across seven years and ten months, he made 1,593 visits; the household’s routines and his repeated presence formed the setting in which the ban’s consequences became visible. The film-world prohibition also sharpened the contrast between Füsun’s ambition and the permission-dependent life imposed on her. Kemal and Feridun came to regard getting the art film underway as their only hope of restoring her spirits, even as censorship and the restrictions on her social life stood in the way.