The Production and Box-Office Success of Broken Lives

The Production and Box-Office Success of Broken Lives turns a commercially minded film project into a revealing episode about Turkish cinema under censorship and about the different futures its success makes possible. Recounted by Kemal Basmacı, the episode follows Feridun’s decision to direct a screenplay already cleared for production, Kemal’s reluctant investment, and the film’s unexpected popularity despite critical hostility. The hit elevates Kemal in the industry even as it deepens the contrast between Papatya’s public ascent and Füsun’s exclusion from the cinematic world Kemal once hoped to open to her.

Industry Conditions and the Project

In January 1981, over lunch at Rejans, Feridun told Kemal that he was tired of making commercials solely for the money and had a screenplay ready to shoot. In the film business, ready meant that the screenplay had passed the censorship board or obtained the state permissions needed for production. With few popular screenplays approved, directors and producers who needed to make one or two films a year might accept a cleared script they had not previously considered. Years of censorship had also made films increasingly uniform by removing material judged sharp, critical, or original.

Kemal’s earlier experience with censorship helps explain this system. The board could first review a screenplay’s subject and scenes, while a complex network of permits, bribes, agents, and agencies grew around applications for state permission. In spring 1977, Kemal and Feridun had considered which agent to use for Blue Rain. One celebrated intermediary, Demir the Typewriter, rewrote scripts in his own style to make them more acceptable: he softened divisions between rich and poor, workers and bosses, and victims and wrongdoers, and could offset a potentially troublesome ending with familiar affirmations of nation, flag, Atatürk, and Allah. This account establishes the industrial pressures surrounding filmmaking; it does not identify Demir as the person who prepared Broken Lives.

Feridun’s screenplay offered a grim melodramatic premise. A wealthy man seduces a young woman who is his distant relation and then abandons her; she seeks revenge by becoming a singer. The songs had been written for Papatya, and Hayal Hayati had initially planned to make the film. When Papatya refused to become dependent on him, he withdrew, leaving the screenplay available. Kemal considered the script and songs crude and unsuitable for Füsun, and regarded the project as a discredit to Feridun. Yet, hoping at least to make Feridun happy, he agreed to finance it before their lunch ended.

Production and Performance

Filming began in May 1981. Although the title echoed Halit Ziya’s novel of the same name, the resemblance largely ended there: the novel’s world of Ottoman mansions and Westernized bourgeois life gave way to the muddy streets and gazinos of 1970s Istanbul. Papatya played a singer who, sustained by anger and will, patiently pursues revenge against the man who dishonored her. Unlike the novel’s heroine, this character suffers because she cannot marry, rather than because she is married.

The production used the old Peri Cinema, a familiar setting for nightclub scenes in films about traditional music. Its theatre seats had been removed and tables installed to create a gazino. Making such scenes credible involved practical compromises. Earlier filmmakers could fill a venue with people seeking free entertainment, who served as unpaid extras; by this period, the production could not attract well-dressed spectators to watch a relatively unknown singer in the dusty cinema. The crew offered free kebabs to men wearing ties and women without headscarves. Even so, extras might leave after eating, read newspapers, joke, or fall asleep while the singer performed.

On Kemal’s first visit to the set, the set manager was scolding extras for looking into the camera. Then Feridun called for the scene to begin, and Papatya walked down the catwalk with a microphone, flanked by the audience. The makeshift production suddenly acquired the rough, mixed quality Kemal associates with Turkish films: part fairy tale, part vulgarity. His recollection also places Papatya’s performance against an earlier role in which she had played an innocent, diplomatic child. In Broken Lives she had become a long-suffering woman marked by misfortune. As she moved through the scene with the composure of a model and the character’s accumulated grief, the inattentive extras and even the waiters stopped to watch.

Premiere, Reception, and Commercial Consequences

Seven weeks later, Broken Lives premiered at the Palace Cinema in Beyoğlu. Neither Feridun’s wife, Füsun, nor Kemal attended. Feridun and Füsun were not speaking, and he had scarcely been home that summer; he was probably living with Papatya. Kemal, who was the producer and owned more than half of Lemon Films, feared that Füsun would see him at the premiere in the newspapers and punish him for going. He arranged for a message to be passed to Lemon Films claiming that his mother was ill and that he could not leave home.

That evening, rather than go to the premiere, Kemal travelled through Taksim and Galatasaray to the Keskin family home in Çukurcuma. Through rain-speckled car windows he glimpsed the people arriving under umbrellas and the posters and announcements paid for by Lemon Films. At supper, no one mentioned the opening. Tarık, Nesibe, Füsun, and Kemal ate macaroni with meat sauce, yogurt with cucumber and garlic, tomato salad, white cheese, and ice cream Kemal had brought from Ömür in Nişantaşı. They repeatedly rose to look at the rain running down Çukurcuma Hill. The ordinary family meal, set against the premiere he had chosen to avoid, makes his divided position tangible: he had helped produce the film, but his attention remained fixed on Füsun and the consequences of her estrangement from Feridun.

The critics dismissed Broken Lives in harsh terms, but audiences in Istanbul and the provinces made it a box-office hit. Viewers left cinemas tearful after the final songs, while the film’s penultimate scene, in which Papatya’s character kills the rich man who had wronged her, provoked widespread exultation. The role’s fictional antagonist became difficult for his actor, Ekrem Güçlü, to escape: people punched and spat upon him in the street, and he stopped going out for a time. The film was also credited with bringing audiences back to cinemas after the years of political violence preceding the military coup.

The revival reached beyond the screen. The Pelür Bar filled again as film-industry regulars returned to make deals and be seen. At a visit there in late October, Kemal found his standing markedly improved. The film’s success had recast him as a prominent producer, and cameramen and actors sought his company. That new reputation concealed the original reason for his involvement in the industry: he had first come to the Pelür hoping to make Füsun a star. Noticing how quickly the industry had forgotten her intensified his attachment to her, even as he congratulated himself on keeping her away from people he considered harmful.

Follow-Up Projects and Public Image

The hit generated immediate plans for further work. Papatya had not sung the songs in the film; an older, little-known singer, a friend of her mother, had supplied the voice. After the success, Papatya was to record the songs herself, and Kemal, Feridun, and their associates agreed that Lemon Films should back the venture and begin a sequel. The sequel was pressed for by cinemas and distributors in Anatolia. Since Papatya’s character appeared to die before achieving a happy family life, the proposed continuation would reveal that she had survived, pretending to be dead after being wounded, and would open in a hospital.

Papatya’s first single, Broken Lives, was released in the first week of January 1982. It did not equal the film’s success but became well liked. Turkey’s only television channel, through its music censorship office, judged the song morally deficient, preventing Papatya’s voice from being heard on television or radio. The record still brought another round of interviews and increased her public visibility. She cultivated a respectable persona distinct from her wounded screen character, presenting herself in domestic settings and discussing the question of whether a modern Turkish Kemalist woman should prioritize work or marriage. Her publicity strategy let her claim both the character’s emotional appeal and a separate image of personal respectability. Feridun admired her professionalism and her ability to manage the press rather than be unsettled by the stories surrounding her.

The film’s trajectory thus runs from a screenplay made viable by prior censorship clearance, through a makeshift but effective production, to a hit that revived cinema audiences and expanded its creators’ prospects. Its success did not erase the limits imposed by censorship or resolve the personal tensions surrounding its production. Instead, it made those tensions more visible: a film about a woman’s injury and revenge could prosper as popular melodrama, while the real woman Kemal had hoped to promote remained absent from its premiere and increasingly peripheral to the public story of his success.