Heartsong

The makers of Heartsong seem to intend a love letter to the Dom community of nomadic Turkish musicians, but the result is dreadful, demeaning, and offensive. It's a comic fable with no discernible moral. Almost everyone in it is portrayed as mostly simple-minded, unjustifiably violent, or stupid. And the problem isn't that the film focuses on a group that scrapes by without running water, electricity, or education. It's not that these people are portrayed as primitive or superstitious. The problem is that it mocks them. The community's musician/dentist gets paid in rams, and that's played for comedy.

But what are we to make of a woman who nostalgically recalls that her father "traded" her for "an ox and a shrill pipe"? This is just too cutesy. The characters are oh so "colorful." A dead fish head talks. Adorable! A man rises from the grave and dances. How folkloric! Beyond the unbelievable, the movie is in every sense reactive. We rarely see action but rather the preludes and aftermaths. When someone is shot, we hear the gun go off from far away. Someone says "let's go help," and the next scene is the funeral. What was the interaction that precipitated the shot? What did the group find when they arrived? Why was murder necessary? The filmmakers don't care enough to tell us.