Heartsong Review: A Melody So Good, You’ll Sing It in Your Sleep

Heartsong (Gönül) is a Turkish musical drama released by Netflix on 10th August with a duration of about 95 minutes. It stars Erkan Kolcak Kostendil, Hazar Erguclu, Bulent Emin Yarar in the lead roles, among others. It’s fueled with romance and anchored with loads of drama that pans a couple fighting superstition and orthodox behaviour by the heroine’s family. 

Netflix describes the film as:

A gypsy singer falls in love with a bride to be. An age old premise with a refreshing take on love, tragedy and heartache.

-Heartsong Review Does Not Contain Spoilers-

Piroz, a gipsy nomad that plays the violin and sings like an extraterrestrial bird at weddings and funerals along with his brother, falls in love with Sumbul, whose wedding he is serenading. Hence begins the harrowing journey of a love aching to be attained, but at what cost? A song, introduced right after the opening credits, which becomes the token of Piroz and Sumbul’s love, is effervescent and uplifting, but something about the setting and characters calls for an impending doom that awaits them all. 

The movie begins with a continuous shot of the protagonist in his element, embodying a high-spirited man, falling right into the gipsy culture that he belongs to. We’re thrown into a world of gipsies, slowly navigating how they function as a people group, what their daily routine looks like and how they interact with one another. Everyone’s life is intertwined with the people within, and the people operate like one big family on vacation. 

The chaos that takes over when someone from the wedding calls the groom a lunatic while Piroz and Sumbul walk toward each other (with no care in the world) is what love and the tragedy that awaits them look like. Piroz’s brother continues to play his melody while disarrayed people fighting like animals assume the screen, serving as the perfect backdrop to a forbidden love story. 

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One man’s ‘impure’ is another man’s cue to dance. So much articulated in that 3 seconds of pure joy. “Her heart is pure”, Piroz says in response to her former groom terming her non-vestal. The film uses a lot of metaphors to make social commentaries as such. Another instance is one when Mirze asks Piroz if Sumbul is a gazelle and not seconds later is she tied down by her father, exactly like a cow. 

Heartsong is a unique romantic drama where the narrative is beyond our grasp of comprehension, and the camera movements just add to the disbalance the movie oh so intends the audience to feel. All these instruments just added to the intriguing storyline of the characters. Piroz and Sumbul might seem a little too far-fetched as grown-ups, but they bring a certain kind of innocence and purity that is hard not to like. Along with the two, other characters are monstrously dense as well, not to the point of pure dumbness, just unbothered. (For instance, when Sumbul’s tresses are being chopped off and she starts playing with them)

Heartsong doesn’t wait for long before introducing the parallel between Piroz’s father, Mirze and Piroz himself. Mirze, who couldn’t unite with the true love of his life, Dilo, verges on the brink of insanity and delusion just so as to be able to feel a minute essence of the love he once shared. Hence, he makes sure, almost unknowingly, for his son Piroz not to fall into the same trap set by society. 

The cinematography surpasses all standards, as the anxiety and joy characters feel on the screen are easily transferred to the audience. All in all, the film is ridiculously beautiful, with every shot one-upping the other in terms of exposure and shots. There are various extreme close-ups throughout the movie to show the deep love or hurt in a character. 

When it comes to music, given the name of the movie and the protagonist’s profession as well as his family’s, the musical score has to be tremendously moving, and Heartsong doesn’t falter in delivering the same. The music perfectly encapsulates the emotions of the characters while delivering extreme doses of energy and melancholy, as and when the story so requires. 

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Mirze, in his highest form of delusion, craves a love so deep and longs for his lost beloved that he cannot differentiate between a real woman and one made out of hay and plastic chippings. You might think that the movie feels incomplete in its narrative, but if you think harder, this was not a story about Piroz and Sumbul, but Mirze and Dilo. It was about how, in the end, their love did triumph. Where one bond ends, another begins to bloom in its place. 

The Perfect Shot

Of course, there’s been many shots and angles in the history of cinema taken from the perspective of dead people, ghosts or basic everyday things, for instance, the classic Rashomon film. Here, the director gives us a glimpse of the people in Piroz’s village through the perspective of a mouth, more so, a tooth, waiting to be uprooted. 

The Wickedly Absurd

Sumbul, when presented with her wedding dress, says the most absurd sentence you can imagine coming out of a ‘to be married’ woman’s mouth “I don’t like the color”, “any other options?” This just goes on to show the innocence and naivety of Sumbul. 

Final Verdict: Heartsong

If it wasn’t evident, the score, the cinematography, the acting, the story arc, the quirkiness, the simplicity and the characters all outdid themselves. I fell in love more with the movie while writing the review than when I first completed it. This should definitely be next on your list. 

Heartsong is streaming now on Netflix.