Production and release of Broken Lives

Production and release of Broken Lives was a turning point for Lemon Films and for Kemal’s standing in Istanbul’s film industry. The film began as Feridun’s opportunity to make a commercially viable, censor-approved picture, but its melodramatic story also echoed the novel’s recurring concerns with women’s honor, pain, and the public consumption of private suffering. Its success brought audiences back to cinemas and made Kemal a prominent producer, even as the film’s release unfolded alongside the quiet estrangement of Füsun and Feridun.

The screenplay and its choice of heroine

Feridun proposed a screenplay he described as ready for production, a term that carried particular weight in an industry where state censorship restricted what could reach the screen. The script had been abandoned after Hayal Hayati withdrew from the project following a dispute with Papatya. Its leading role was written for Papatya, not Füsun: it required a suggestive performance and revealing costumes, and named Tahir Tan as the leading man. Kemal objected to Tahir Tan, and the two men argued over the casting and the film’s suitability. Their disagreement partly obscured the more personal question of why Füsun would not star in their first film together.

The screenplay centered on a wealthy man who seduces a distant female relative and then abandons her. The betrayed woman becomes a singer and patiently pursues revenge through the years. The songs had been written for Papatya, and her role gave the project its central performance. Kemal considered the script and songs poor, and believed that the material would be unsuitable for Füsun and damaging to Feridun’s reputation. Nevertheless, he agreed to finance the production, hoping that making Feridun happy might have some value. In May 1981, Feridun began filming under the title Broken Lives, borrowed from Halit Ziya’s eighty-year-old novel. The resemblance between the two works largely ended with the title: the novel’s world of Ottoman mansions and Westernized elites gave way to the muddy streets and gazinos of 1970s Istanbul. In the film, Papatya’s heroine becomes famous through the love songs she performs in gazinos while waiting to avenge the man who wronged her. Unlike the novel’s heroine, she is miserable not because she is married but because she cannot marry.

Filming and Papatya’s performance

The production used the old Peri Cinema, a favored location for films set in traditional-music nightclubs. Its theater seats were removed and tables installed to create the appearance of a gazino, the kind of venue where patrons ate and drank while watching singers and other performers. The setting suited a familiar melodramatic pattern: the heroine first declares her pain before one audience, then, years later, wins the sympathy and acclaim of another.

At Kemal’s first visit to the set, the set manager was scolding extras for looking into the camera. Once Feridun called for the scene to begin, Papatya walked down the catwalk with a microphone, flanked by the audience. Kemal remembered her in contrast to a film he had seen five years earlier with Füsun and Feridun, in which she had played an innocent child helping to reconcile separated parents. In Broken Lives, she occupied the role of an angry, long-suffering woman whose life has been shaped by betrayal and a desire for revenge. The contrast made the change in her screen persona especially legible to Kemal. Although the production relied on a makeshift musical accompaniment assembled from clips from other films, Papatya’s assured walk and committed performance held the set’s attention: the extras stopped dozing, and even the waiters carrying kebabs paused to watch.

The premiere and the film’s reception

Seven weeks later, Broken Lives premiered at the Palace Cinema in Beyoğlu. Neither Füsun nor Kemal attended. Füsun was not speaking with Feridun, who had scarcely been home that summer and, in Kemal’s estimation, was probably living with Papatya. Feridun visited the family home in Çukurcuma every other week to collect a few belongings. Füsun had made clear that Kemal was not to raise the subject, and Kemal learned of a quarrel during one of those visits from Aunt Nesibe. He feared that Füsun would be upset if she read of his presence at the premiere, so he arranged for Lemon Films to be told that his mother was ill. On the rainy evening of the screening, he passed the Palace Cinema on the way to dinner with the Keskins, seeing its posters and the well-dressed guests through the car window. No one at the house mentioned the event; the family ate together while rain fell over Çukurcuma Hill.

The critics treated the film harshly, but audiences in Istanbul and the provinces embraced it. Viewers left the humid cinemas with swollen eyes after Papatya’s final songs, and the scene in which her character kills the rich man who had wronged her provoked broad exultation. The role’s appeal crossed age and regional lines, and the film was credited with bringing back spectators who had avoided cinemas during the years of political violence preceding the coup. Its reception demonstrated how effectively the film’s melodramatic reversals could turn an individual grievance into collective feeling.

Commercial consequences and the film’s wider significance

The success also had consequences beyond the screen. The actor Ekrem Güçlü, who played the villain, became so associated with the character that he temporarily stopped going out after being punched and spat upon in the streets. At the same time, the revived cinema business brought former regulars back to Pelür Bar, where film professionals gathered to make deals or simply to be seen. When Kemal visited at the end of October, shortly before curfew, the film’s commercial success had changed how others regarded him. As a producer with more than half of Lemon Films, he had become a sought-after figure; cameramen and famous actors wanted to sit at his table and cultivate his friendship.

The film’s public triumph contrasts with the uneasy circumstances around its making and premiere. Its lead actress performed a story of betrayal and revenge while Füsun, the woman Kemal had hoped might appear in their first production, remained absent from the project and estranged from her husband. The screenplay’s pursuit of popular appeal, its conventional melodramatic plot, and its forceful audience response also recall the open-air cinema scenes in which Kemal watched Orhan Gencebay films with Füsun. Those earlier screenings had made the crowd’s reactions to stories of dishonor and romantic pain part of Kemal’s own experience. Broken Lives returned such material to the screen, but this time Kemal participated as producer—and found that its success could restore a public industry while intensifying the private silences surrounding the people closest to him.