Hababam Sinifi series

(YouTube Streaming, December 2019) Since I don’t want my review of Hababam Sinifi to create an international incident between Canada and Turkey Türkiye, now would be a good time to talk about a few axioms of movie criticism. Much as I believe in the universality of some great movies that manage to reach a wide public, I also believe that what makes some movies great for a specific audience also makes them incomprehensible to others. If you’re a philatelist and there’s a movie that caters to be very specific habits, in-jokes and dilemmas of stamp collection, those very specific aspects could reach you specifically while making the film far less understandable to audiences without knowledge of the hobby. Nearly everything in that statement could also apply to movies made at any time and place. I can think about dozens of French-Canadian movies that work because they reflect very specific aspects of their culture and society, but would be nothing special, or even impenetrable, to audiences outside that specific group. So (to get to the point), when I say that Hababam Sinifi left me wondering what the fuss was all about, I’m mainly recognizing my limits in assessing something so far away from my cultural reference points that I’m not even sure that I should be reviewing it. I got interested in the film because it’s often mentioned as one of the most popular Turkish movies ever made, and expanding horizons don’t usually hurt movie reviewers. It’s not as if Hababam Sinifi is an esoteric art film: it’s best described as a low-brow boarding school comedy in which the students take on the administration. The comic conceit of the film becomes obvious given that its lead actor Kemal Sunal was 31 at the film’s release, yet playing a high-schooler: this is not meant to be taken all that seriously. Episodic comic episodes make up most of the film’s running time, and either the comedy is not meant to be refined, or I missed most of the refinements through the rough translated subtitles. I probably would have gotten more out of the film is I had any affinity for high-school comedies, or if I recognized any of the actors. It’s occasionally fun, and it doesn’t take much to recognize that Sunal was a gifted comic actor. There’s even a link between Türkiye and French Canada as the characters make references to the then-upcoming Montréal Olympics complete with a T-shirt with the logo of the event. Nonetheless, I was left puzzled by much of Hababam Sinifi’s humour—it loses something once you’re out of the film’s cultural sphere. Still, I got what I wanted: exposure to something different, and one checkmark on most “Top Turkish movies” lists.