Lola and Billy the Kid

Turbulent Turkish trannies, raging cock-sucking skinheads, homophobic Turk leather-fags, brother-raping fagola family men, dapper ass-bandit Aryan aristocrats, and Turk tonk twinks just make some of the more sexually and socially confused characters of the culturally and racially mongrelized German film Lola and Billy the Kid (1999) aka Lola und Bilidikid directed by queer Turkish auteur Kutluğ Ataman (Karanlik sular, 2 Girls); a work that wonderfully, wildly, wantonly depicts the trouble German-born Turks face in the Fatherland that is not their own father's. A uniquely unhealthy yet undeniably provocative convergence of seedy and sometimes superficial melodrama and skin-deep sodo-mania, an astute study on fag-on-fag fag-bashing, mischievously macabre ultra-low-camp carnal comedy, ridiculous yet relevant race hate, and an endearing ending fit for a sentimental eunuch, Lola and Billy the Kid is the sort of flick one would expect was directed by a cosmopolitan yet racially-conscious foreigner who was at some point in his life deeply influenced by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons (1978), the films of Pedro Almodóvar, personal political science, and the most deleteriously debauched drag shows in little Turkey, Berlin. In terms of engrossing entertainment, Lola and Billy the Kid is a near Memetis mud-packer masterpiece, but as a work of stoically serious celluloid art, one might say that the film leads one to conclude that director Ataman does not deserve to lick crusty kraut queer auteur Rosa von Praunheim’s pretty pink shoes, although it is a work that will surely appeal to fanatical fans of New German cinema, if only for the fact that there has been a void in Teutonic cinema for a number of decades now, so it is ironic that a foreigner would fill it to some extent. Although featuring a number of standout characters and an engaging plot and subplots that could be easily followed by the typical pedestrian American filmgoer, Lola and Billy the Kid – a work featuring politically incorrect puffs and a celluloid call to castration anxiety – is not exactly the sort of film that will appeal to mainstream audiences, let alone entire families, despite the fact that perturbing family matters are an innate characteristic of the plot. Although I certainly cannot vouch for them, I seriously doubt the average Turk would be a fan of Lola and Billy the Kid as it makes it seem like every Turkish man is a turbulent self-loathing turd-burglar or tormented masochistic shemale and that every Turkish mother is a fervent fag-enabler. Needless to say, these Turk Teutons are not in Istanbul anymore, but a nation that trashed their own culture and customs after losing two cataclysmic World Wars and replaced it with a degenerate dedication to hyper-hedonism, senseless self-indulgence, and any human weakness for pleasure that would could imagine of.

Seventeen-year-old street-rat Murat (Baki Davrak) has one warped Turkish sodomite family as it is full of incestuous semon demon secrets that would even shock kraut queen von Praunheim, if not influence to stalk gay bars on Turkish ghetto section of Berlin. For starters, Murat’s older brother Osman (Hasan Ali Mete) – who is apparently a lapsed limp-wrister himself despite now having a family of his own – wants to set his young bro straight by various methods, including treating him to strippers and statuesque German prostitutes, which he firmly turns down as he rather takes his chances giving away tricks in tearoom toilet stalls located at the Berlin Olympiastadion (Olympic Stadium; site of the 1936 'Nazi' summer Olympics) while on school field-trips, even if his male suitor – a novice neo-nazi in training – is compelled to smear the queer at the insistence of his Turk-terrorizing friends. Unbeknownst to Murat, he has another brother named Lola (Gandi Mukli) who was disowned by his family because he is an unrepentant member of the prissy pink team who once showed up in his Islamic homestead wearing a female neon red wig, thereupon resulting in his permanent banishment (with Murat being as a result of his father's need to 'replace' his exiled son). Lola’s boyfriend Bilidikid aka Billy (Erdal Yildiz) – a homo-hating, ultra-masculine iron hoof poofter who earns his living by allowing guys to blow him in bathroom stalls with semen stains covering the wall – wants his buttercup boi toy to cut his cock off so the two can go back to Turkey and form a ‘proper family’ as man and wife and not live a openly gay life like "German fags." Meanwhile, a degenerate German aristocrat named Friedrich von Schmidt (Michael Gerber) begins a relationship that starts with a bought blow-job in a public park with Turk hustler Iskender (Murat Yilmaz), who also happens to be a colon-choking compatriot of reluctant bent boy Bilidikid. An anachronistic aged aristocrat who is in denial about her less prestigious position in society, Friedrich’s mother Ute (Inge Keller) cannot get down with her son’s brown beau. On top of dealing with insanely inflamed flaming inter-gay Turkish relations, the ripped rectum realm of the Turkish ghetto is stalked by a group of hostile and, in some cases, homosexual, German skinheads who especially have a desire to smash and gay bash Lola while s/he is dressed in drag. Beginning with absurd but highly hilarious incendiary verbal insults like “camel fucker” and “go back to Bagdad” at the Turkish sods, it is only a matter of time before the two had a shadow that makes for some sort of hyper-degenerate postmodern globalist West Side Story from multicultural hell.

Despite being directed by a Turk, Lola and Billy the Kid makes no attempt to portray his people in a pristinely positive light nor does he layer the film with pathetic politically correct puffery as is typical of similar racial ‘outsider’ films in ethno-masochistic Europa.  After all, I doubt any sane person would find it normal to see a nearly elderly Turkish peasant woman giving her son a bath in an archaic washtub. Indeed, while portraying Turks and Teutons as fatally flawed individuals trying to retain their dignity in a state of impenetrable racial and cultural chaos. While a whole family of Turks has produced a family of all flaming fairies who would have otherwise lived rather conventional lives had they grown up in their homeland, even if buggering adolescent boys on the side, the everyday blue-collar Germans – fed up with a nation that has nothing to offer them yet harbors mostly illegal ‘refugees’ – takes out their hatred on the foreign other; individuals, who when especially dressed in flamboyant drag, stick out like sore brown thumbs.  Somewhat nihilistic in its message, Lola and Billy the Kid is certainly not the kind of liberal feel-good sentimentalist drama that left activists would praise as artistic evidence of the oxymoronic statement that "diversity is our strength."  Directed with a distinctly Turkish and queer persuasion, Lola and Billy the Kid reveals that auteur Kutluğ Ataman has seriously studied the kultur of the nation he depicts, most obviously with references to morbid melodramas of New German cinema Über-auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder, especially Katzelmacher (1969), In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) and Lola (1981) without assembling an inept gross accidental parody of these films.  For an enthralling if not overly ambitious look at multicultural Germany after Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) and Fassbinder from a positively personal and peculiar perspective, Lola and Billy the Kid makes for an audacious cinematic affair with the culturally, socially, and sexually abstracted ausländer that might make one think twice about visiting bathrooms in the Turkish sector of town. 

-Ty E