This essay contains spoilers for both versions of the film.

Atıf Yılmaz’s Aaahh Belinda, written by Barış Pirhasan and released in 1986, is one of the cult films of Turkish cinema. It follows an actor named Serap, played by Müjde Ar, who reluctantly appears in a shampoo commercial. During the shoot she is transported into the life of Naciye, the conventional wife and mother she is supposed to portray. What begins as an advertising performance becomes an unsettling alternative reality.

The film was remade for Netflix in 2023 as Oh Belinda, directed by Deniz Yorulmazer and starring Neslihan Atagül, Serkan Çayoğlu, and Necip Memili. In the remake, Serap becomes Dilara and Naciye becomes Handan, but the basic premise remains intact: an independent actor enters the patriarchal domestic world represented by her commercial role and struggles to return to her former life.

The distance between the two films allows us to ask a broader question. What happens when a feminist critique shaped by the cultural politics of 1980s Turkey is transferred to the 2020s? The comparison reveals not only changes in representations of women, but also a major transformation in advertising, consumer culture, and the relationship between popular culture and political criticism.

Two Women, Two Social Worlds

In both films, the protagonist regards commercial acting as inferior to her work in the theatre. She is asked to perform a traditional femininity completely removed from her own life: a woman who cooks, cares for children, serves her family, and finds fulfilment within a male-dominated household. While trying to make this performance convincing, she steps out of the shower and discovers that the fictional identity has become real. She now has a husband, children, a job at a bank, and a social environment that recognizes her not as an actor but as the woman in the advertisement.

The fantasy brings two forms of womanhood into direct confrontation. Serap and Dilara possess cultural capital, economic independence, and lifestyles that exceed conventional gender norms. Naciye and Handan inhabit more traditional domestic and class positions. The protagonist’s terror arises partly from the sudden loss of her autonomy, but it also exposes the distance separating women whose lives are structured by unequal access to money, education, cultural resources, and social freedom.

Atıf Yılmaz reportedly described the original as a “socially engaged fantasy film.” Its surreal premise is inseparable from its social critique: advertising does not merely represent a stereotypical woman but attempts to turn women into that stereotype.

The Cultural Politics of the 1980s

The original film emerged from a distinctive moment in Turkey. Following the military coup of 12 September 1980, the country gradually returned to electoral politics while undergoing rapid neoliberal transformation. Privatization, import liberalization, and integration into global markets accelerated the construction of a consumer society. Advertising expanded alongside television and the growing availability of consumer goods.

This economic change also had a political dimension. The decade before the coup had been marked by intense conflict between left- and right-wing movements. In the post-coup environment, consumerism, entertainment, celebrity culture, and lifestyle media helped redirect public attention away from collective political struggle. Advertising became one of the institutions through which the pleasures and promises of the new economic order were circulated.

Yet the same period also created space for new oppositional movements. Feminist activism, which had often remained secondary within the male-dominated organizations of the pre-1980 left and right, began to emerge as an autonomous movement. Its most visible participants were frequently educated, urban, middle-class women with access to economic and cultural capital. The writer and journalist Duygu Asena became one of the emblematic figures of the period; her 1987 book Kadının Adı Yok (Woman Has No Name) articulated a widely recognizable rebellion against patriarchal norms and was adapted for film by Atıf Yılmaz in the same year.

Müjde Ar’s Serap belongs to this cultural landscape. She is an intellectual and a theatre actor, lives independently, values bodily autonomy, and moves within an artistic milieu shaped by the language of women’s liberation. The play being staged by her theatre company is Asiye Nasıl Kurtulur? (How Can Asiye Be Saved?), Vasıf Öngören’s politically charged work about the social conditions that push a woman into sex work. Atıf Yılmaz had also adapted the play for cinema in 1986, again with Müjde Ar. Its presence within Aaahh Belinda connects Serap’s individual story to a broader critique of gendered exploitation, violence, and the moral order that conceals them.

From Serap to Dilara

Serap’s encounter with advertising reflects the hierarchy between theatre and commercial culture in the 1980s. Theatre represents artistic seriousness and high culture; advertising appears superficial and vulgar. Serap and her colleagues may disapprove of commercials, but financial necessity makes participation difficult to avoid. The tension is historically credible because advertising was still becoming established as a powerful cultural industry.

Dilara, by contrast, already lives inside the culture industry. She performs at a venue called Taksim Theatre, making her entrance to a song by Sezen Aksu, one of Turkey’s most celebrated pop musicians. The sequence is glossy, expensive, and spectacular. Rather than presenting an alternative theatrical culture, it resembles the polished entertainment world from which contemporary advertising is already inseparable.

The remake emphasizes Dilara’s blunt and rebellious personality, partly through the frequency of her sexist swearing. This may be intended to establish her distance from the compliant woman she is asked to play, but the device is overused. Her rebelliousness becomes a matter of attitude more than political position.

The women into whom the protagonists transform also differ. Naciye in the original is largely the “ideal” woman imagined by the commercial: respectable, hardworking, self-sacrificing, and domestically responsible. Handan, however, is having a secret affair with her bank manager, who is also her brother-in-law, and appears to be involved in a plan to steal money and escape. The discovery of the hidden money eventually gives Dilara a way to resist the life imposed upon her.

Handan’s transgression complicates the stereotype. It suggests that women who appear to embody the commercial’s ideal may possess desires, secrets, and escape plans of their own. Yet the change also makes Handan more individually culpable and shifts attention away from the structural conditions that defined Naciye’s life.

What Disappears in the Remake

The original film gives Naciye a meaningful relationship with her neighbour Feride, who helps her when she attends evening rehearsals. This everyday solidarity between women is pushed into the background in the remake. More importantly, How Can Asiye Be Saved? disappears. The 2023 film shows Dilara preparing for another glossy performance but does not replace Öngören’s play with an equivalently critical contemporary work. As a result, much of the original’s political and cultural framework disappears with it.

The economic background is also weakened. In the 1986 film, Naciye’s husband repeatedly turns off unnecessary lights and worries about household expenses. Women’s participation in paid employment is connected to the financial pressures facing urban families during Turkey’s neoliberal transition. Domestic life is marked not only by patriarchy but also by economic constraint.

The remake reproduces details of this household without fully adapting their meaning. A conversation about salmon, for instance, appears to signal unfamiliarity with an upper-middle-class taste. Dilara also suggests hiring a cleaner, although paid domestic cleaning has become a familiar part of middle-class urban life in contemporary Turkey. Such moments do not develop into a sustained account of the economic pressures, labour relations, or inequalities of the 2020s.

This is the central missed opportunity. A contemporary version could have asked what feminist agency, domestic labour, economic insecurity, and class difference look like in present-day Turkey. It might have imagined Dilara through the country’s diverse feminist movements or connected Handan’s life to current forms of precarious work and gendered care. Instead, the remake transfers much of the earlier plot into the present without constructing an equally specific social world around it.

Advertising After Television

The original film’s second major subject is advertising itself. In the 1980s, television commercials helped industrialize and circulate gender stereotypes on a mass scale. The Belinda shampoo advertisement condenses the ideological function of advertising into a single fantasy: the actor must inhabit the patriarchal role so completely that performance becomes identity.

The advertising environment of the 2020s is very different. Sexist conventions have certainly not disappeared, but they coexist with femvertising-advertising that adopts the language and imagery of women’s empowerment. Audiences are also shaped less exclusively by the conventional television spot. Influencers, lifestyle creators, and “insta-moms” now model femininity, consumption, domesticity, and motherhood through apparently intimate forms of digital communication.

A contemporary Oh Belinda could therefore have asked what it means to be absorbed into an influencer persona, an empowerment campaign, or the carefully managed authenticity of social media. By retaining a commercial that belongs so clearly to the media environment of the 1980s, the remake leaves advertising itself curiously untouched by four decades of transformation. Dilara cannot experience the same estrangement from advertising as Serap, because actors and other cultural workers now move routinely between theatre, television, branded content, and digital promotion.

Two Endings, Two Forms of Rebellion

The different endings clarify the films’ distinct politics. In the original, Serap returns to the commercial set at the moment when she has fully internalized Naciye. She finally makes the role convincing because she has lived and accepted the gendered reality the advertisement demanded. The return is therefore deeply ambiguous: escape becomes possible only after conformity has entered her body and behaviour.

Dilara also begins to accommodate herself to Handan’s life, but her rebellion remains more spectacular. When she realizes that she will not regain her desired place in the theatre production, she scatters the stolen money from the roof of Taksim Theatre and dances wildly. She does not enter the role as completely as Serap does; she preserves the posture of an unruly individual.

Yet spectacular defiance is not necessarily a substitute for political critique. The scene offers the image of rebellion without fully explaining the contemporary structures against which Dilara rebels. Her resistance is emotionally forceful but socially less grounded.

How Should Oh Belinda Be Remade Today?

Remaking a cult film created by a director such as Atıf Yılmaz and a screenwriter such as Barış Pirhasan is inevitably ambitious. The original must also be understood as one point within Yılmaz’s wider body of women-centred cinema, including Asiye Nasıl Kurtulur?, Adı Vasfiye, Kadının Adı Yok, and the 1992 film Düş Gezginleri, which tells the story of love between two women. Aaahh Belinda gains much of its critical force from this larger cinematic and political context.

The remake is enjoyable, and its return to this story may introduce a younger generation to one of Turkish cinema’s most inventive feminist narratives. But every film expresses the cultural, economic, and political conditions in which it is made. Transferring a story from one decade to another requires more than updating costumes, locations, and performers. It requires asking what has changed in women’s lives, in popular culture, and in the industries that manufacture gendered ideals.

The question of what an Oh Belinda for Turkey in the 2020s should look like therefore remains open. The 2023 remake revives the original’s premise, but the more difficult work of reinventing its critique is still waiting to be done.