Highly controversial, La pasión turca continues Spanish director Aranda's fascination with the dark side of love.

Desideria 'Desi' Oliván, a well to do woman from Ávila, Spain will marry Ramiro, a handsome young man from a solid background and promising future.

Ramiro is an attentive but not very passionate husband and after five years of marriage, they begin to worry that they still do not have children.

They have sex in the tour bus and from then on Desideria takes advantage of every opportunity during the trip to escape into the arms of her lover.

She offers to divorce him, but Ramiro agrees to support the child and the couple decides to stay together.

After the funeral, grieve stricken, Desi flees for Istanbul looking to forget the drama she is leaving behind and to be reunited with her lover.

When he is not working as a tourist guide, Yaman sells Turkish carpets at the bazaar in a family business with his brother.

Georges Corraface plays the role of Yaman, the handsome Turkish tourist guide, whose sexual powers made Deisdera falls madly in love with him Corraface is a French- Greek actor who has had an international career in film, most notably in Escape from L.A. and Christopher Columbus.

The story and the character of Yaman attracted him, a man he describes as sadly unable to love and hold that feeling.

Loles León had the small role of a Spanish embassy employée; she had worked for Pedro Almodóvar in Tie Me Up!

In 1994, Andrés Vicente Gómez, a Spanish film producer, had the idea to adapt to the big screen the popular novel La Pasión Turca, written by Antonio Gala.

The year before, Gomez had produced Aranda's movie El Amante Bilingüe, a film adaptation of a novel written by Juan Marsé.

El Amante Bilingüe (1993) had been a critical and commercial disappointment; nevertheless, the producer and director were eager to make another film together.

I argued that what it seemed to me indispensable, as thesis of the film, was that passion can destroy but it cannot be denied, and my solution eventually prevailed.

We were in a good hotel, everything was very cheap and we used to go shopping to that wonderful place that is the Great Bazaar...we were accused of using stereotypes.

Showing Barcelona, they present a mule carrying pitchers led by an old man in black.

'[3] The character of Desideria Oliván was based on a real woman even though Gala vehemently denied this.

[4] She was a woman from a well-off family from Lleida, married, and during a holiday in Turkey, fell in love with a local man, leaving everything for him.

It was revealed to the film crew, during shooting in the Grand Bazaar, that the real Desideria had a store there, selling carpets.

Aranda recalled that out of courtesy, he tried to inform her that a film, slightly based on her life, was being made, but she declined any contact with them.

The destructive power of uncontrollable passion and sexual desire also appeared as a theme in Aranda's films: Amantes (1991), Intruso (1993) and Celos (1999).

La pasión turca slightly resembles Shirley Valentine (1989), a play adapted into a film, in which a middle-aged, working class, housewife's life is transformed after a holiday abroad.

1,200,000 tickets were sold in Spain alone and the film made 625 million pesetas at the box office.

The actors were great, the story was intriguing and Vicente Aranda took advantage of the location and all the resources he was provided with.