Andropoz: An Elegy For a Real Man
By Malik Mufti
A review of "Andropoz" ("Man at Pause" in English), written by Engin Günaydın; Netflix (2022), 6 episodes. Warning: some spoilers.
Engin Günaydın's excellent Netflix comedy opens with a dead man in a small boat run aground, and the threnodial undertone established by this opening shot is sustained by the show's melancholy theme music throughout the often very funny developments that ensue.
Who is the dead man, and what killed him? The first spoken words are by the central character Yusuf (Engin Günaydın), owner of a small clothing and accessories store in the Turkish coastal town of Marmaris, who is undergoing a mid-life crisis: "It's time for a change now ... the world is not what it used to be." Yusuf fears that time "wants to kill me," and that his only hope is to change and adapt. His sister Fadime (Şebnem Hassanisoughi) sees a dead man as she reads the coffee cup of Yusuf's wife Meryem (played intelligently and movingly by a superlative Derya Karadaş). Will he turn out to be the dead man?
Yusuf decides that the needed transformation entails adopting European ways. He dyes his hair because blond people "are more intelligent ... more brave," and attempts to wear blue contact lenses but can't get them on. He takes Meryem for drinks at the beach – "the Europeans call this 'happy hour' ... are we any less than them?" – and suggests selling her late father's mountain cabin so they can buy a beachfront villa for sale. Meryem is shocked at first, calling the cabin "a paternal legacy," but is won over.
Change requires courage, Yusuf is told, but he is far from a brave man – as he himself recognizes and as is indicated in a number of humorous ways (including an infected ingrown hair). His brother-in-law, Fadime's husband Halit (played by Tamer Karadağlı in another fine performance), also speaks about the need to change and perceives that it relates somehow to masculinity, but lacking self-understanding and self-control, he remains trapped in a parody, sometimes funny and sometimes chillingly scary, of what a real man is supposed to be.
Instead, the classic Turkish ideal of manliness is embodied by the owner of the villa Yusuf and Meryem hope to buy, a wealthy man with, it is suggested, a criminal background by the hybrid Islamic-Turkic name of Mahmut Timuçin (Turgut Tunçalp in an outstanding performance that deserves to be called iconic). Mahmut Timuçin is brave and tough, fully self-aware but also attuned to the needs and shortcomings of others. His strong sense of propriety – particularly towards women – acts as a restraint on his own temper as well as on the excesses of those around him. But he too is now past his prime and realizes that he has failed to attain happiness. His fate is prefigured by a background sound of buzzing flies at his first appearance in the form of a large photograph attached to the wall of the villa he wants to sell. Soon thereafter, to reinforce the premonition, an arrow hits his image in the forehead, shot by his manic estranged wife Şahinde (Gülçin Santırcıoğlu).
The interaction between these three families drives the rest of the story, and in all three cases a decisive shift in gender dynamics takes place. The Biblically-named patriarch Yusuf and matriarch Meryem find themselves increasingly marginalized by their teenage daughter Akya (Doğa Zeynep Doğuşlu) and their 15-year old son Velihan's (Ergin Torun) girlfriend Sıla (Zeynep Selimoğlu), both headstrong girls who completely dominate their boyfriends. Halit is abandoned by Fadime after he beats her in a drunken rage, causing her to miscarry – she tells Meryem "something has happened to me ... I want to change myself," later adding that "men are the enemies of happiness," and is last seen literally flying free as she paraglides over Marmaris. Mahmut Timuçin is propelled to his doom by the combined machinations of his wife Şahinde, Russian mistress Svetlana (Yuliia Sobol), and flirtatious daughter Ahu (Melissa Dilber).
In the show's closing monologue, delivered by a woman this time, Sıla's and Velihan's teacher tells her class: "A Chinese proverb says, when the winds of change start to blow, some build walls, some build windmills." The democratic experience in Turkish life is now more than seven decades old, but the internalized values of liberalism have been much slower in coming. In the teacher's final words, however, "we are right in the middle of the transformation" now. As Meryem and Yusuf (resigned in the end to his toothlessness) look out from the porch of the villa they have inherited from poor Mahmut Timuçin at Akya and her brother frolicking in the sea like the fish after which she is named, the viewer is left to contemplate not just what is being gained by the onset of liberalism, but also what is being lost.