Recep İvedik is a 2008 Turkish comedy film, directed by Togan Gökbakar, and the name of the main character, an oafish man played by Şahan Gökbakar. Recep İvedik takes up residence in an expensive Antalya hotel to win back his childhood love. The film, which went on nationwide general release across Turkey on, was the highest grossing Turkish film of 2008. The film's titular comic character was created by Şahan Gökbakar for his Turkish comedy television show Dikkat Şahan Çıkabilir, which ran from 2005 to 2006, and has subsequently gone on to feature in a series of sequel films. The film was shot on location in Istanbul and Antalya, Turkey.
Plot
İvedik is a fearsome-looking uncultivated driver with a lot of aggression but a spark of goodness in him. Involved by accident in a street fight, he rescues the wallet of the owner of an Antalya luxury hotel and hitchhikes his way south to restore it to the rightful owner. Along the way he is made the object of an unlikely attempted seduction by a homosexual truck-driver, reacting with shock and innocence. Reaching the hotel to hand over the wallet, he begins his stay by shattering a porcelain vase in the hotel lobby and talks his way out of the situation in exactly the same way as earlier burlesque characters. After giving back the wallet, he is about to leave when he glimpses his childhood sweetheart Sibel among a party of arriving guests and decides to take up the owner's offer of a free stay in the hotel. Gökbakar then uses İvedik to burlesque every aspect of five star hotel life. Unable to use the toilets, he pees in the ornamental flowers, drinks the hotel shampoo as well as the contents of the minibar, massages the foot of an amorous woman in mistake for Sibel's, gatecrashes women's morning fitness exercises on the beach in a ludicrous purple gown, and cuffs the heads of almost everyone who comes into contact with him. All the while he pours out a stream of inappropriate invective and obscenities. By the close of the film most middle class conventions have also been shattered, a high point being a burping contest between him and Sibel. Sibel, who is resisting her bourgeois mother's attempts to marry her off to a fiance she does not love, contains a very mild criticism of the middle class lifestyles and attitudes with which İvedik is colliding. By making a sweet nice girl like Sibel belch at full volume, Gökbakar comes closest to an outright repudiation of middle class values. The film ends with İvedik leaving the hotel. Has catharsis been achieved? No. İvedik departs more or less exactly as he arrived, presumably en route to more adventures in his next film. Yet somehow he ends up by being not so much frightening as slightly loveable—no doubt because he no longer appears wholly dangerous. It is Sibel's view of him which has changed—and that of the film audience too.
