Film Review: Allah Yazdıysa Bozsun

Allah Yazdıysa Bozsun (translated as If God Wrote It, Let It Break It, a terrible translation, or alternatively God Forbid, still not great) is a Turkish romance. You can watch it on Youtube below; the subtitles are not fantastic and you have to accommodate the mistranslation of Turkish o as he / she in the wrong gender, since their pronoun is gender neutral. Also, there is a text which, not knowing Turkish well, I had to put through Google Translate, anyhow.

The film is rather generic, about a man (Burak) who is set to marry the wrong woman (Eliz), who has deceived him so as to marry him, and pretended to be his penpal from childhood, when in fact it was her friend (Irmak), with whom Burak was penpals.

The main reason for watching it for me was that it is in Turkish. The language is very beautiful; in a way, it sounds Norwegian at times, or has a similar melody. I believe this is due in large part to the vowel inventory, which is rather similar, or at least has a large amount of /ø/ and /y/. The palatalisation in words such as görmek is also very prominent.

I have a book from the Teach Yourself series about Turkish, and would like to try engaging more with the language at some point; I do think it is very beautiful.

Returning to the film, it was perfectly adequate. I found the music, which was largely sort of generic, thematic, acoustic music, was adequate but certainly not particularly gripping. At the beginning of the film, I thought it would dislike it terribly, however as it went on I did find myself enjoying it more.

Irmak tends to overact. I am not sure if that is a feature of her character, or a characteristic of Turkish film, or is intended to be comedic. It is strange in my opinion regardless.

Irmak's clothing is fantastic. Her outfits in every scene are incredible.

The fact that it came to a head on the day of the wedding was predictable and overused; after Burak's discussion with his grandfather, I had hoped that he would have immediately gone and resolved the issue. The fact that he was cowardly about it is I suppose a relevant detail, and could not avoided, particularly given the chat he had with Irmak on the wedding day about his being lonely; regardless, I think it would have been better to handle the story in another way. The fact that it was a phone call that was overheard due to being on the screen which brought the lie to prominence was very tacky.

All that said, I still enjoyed the film, and particularly listening to the Turkish, though it certainly is no masterpiece.