Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Have You Ever Seen Fireflies?’ on Netflix, a Turkish Dramedy About an Eccentric Woman and Her Beloved Glowing Bugs

Netflix movie Have You Ever Seen Fireflies? insists that fireflies are magical things that not everyone can see, rather than some bugs that make their presence known in the backyard at dusk. I think that’s our cue to consider this Turkish production — based on a 1999 stage play — a heightened-reality movie, the type that doesn’t quite adhere to the known physical laws of the world, and falls somewhere between “magical realism” and “gritty docudrama.” And frankly, it might make a lot more sense if you contextualize it outside the realm of what we recognize as human behavior.

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN FIREFLIES?: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Two YouTubers set up their gear in a retirement home for an interview with an eccentric old woman who can accurately multiply four-digit numbers in her head. No doubt expecting a quick-hit human-calculator would-be viral video, they’re likely not prepared to hear her life story, but they patiently indulge her, because a movie about two jerks who tell a lonely lady to STFU and just do her damn parlor trick wouldn’t be much of a movie at all. Gulseren (Ecem Erkek) gets out her photo album and starts with the day of her birth in 1951, and surprisingly, she seems to know all the details of the political argument her father and uncle have, despite it occurring in the moments before she even emerged from the womb. So perhaps this is a fanciful biographical account and should be taken with a grain of salt — and we haven’t even gotten to the firefly thing yet.

Let’s briefly pause to note that Erkek plays Gulseren throughout all stages of the character’s life, wearing ribbons in her hair as a schoolgirl and clumpy prosthetics as a senior citizen. To balance this cartoonishness, scene transitions frequently show animated newspaper headlines chronicling social and political unrest and transition in Turkey, a backdrop for Gulseren’s life. Her father, Nazif (Engin Alkan), is a pushover sweetheart, full of unconditional love; when she’s expelled from school for being disrespectful to — and essentially being smarter than — her teacher, she talks him into getting an ice cream cone on the way home. Her mother, Iclal (Devrim Yakut), is uptight, judgmental and a little bit nasty. The family apparently shares an inherited mansion in the heart of Istanbul with Gulseren’s aunts and uncles, who appear when the plot needs them and are nowhere to be seen when it doesn’t. We learn that her great-grandfather on her father’s side served as the Sultan’s “toothpickman,” so maybe that explains the prime real estate?

Nazif is fine with Gulseren being herself. Iclal is not — she insists upon arranging Gulseren’s marriage to a man who’s heir to a fortune built upon the invention and sale of spoons, sieves and strainers, which might be symbolic of something if you have time to ponder it. Gulseren will have none of this, of course. The nuptial prospect’s family visits and Gulseren effs mercilessly with their conservative ideals by making sure the topics of conversation rarely sway from her many (fictional) past husbands and partners. She does the same when Iclal brings the family to a hodja (a wise mystic) to consult the djinni and figure out why Gulseren is such a freakin’ weirdo.

Years pass, through the political tumult of the 1970s, when antifascists used the brick walls of their home for spraypainted sloganeering, and the goofy fashion of the ’80s, when Gulseren swoops all her hair to one side for her first-ever job interview, to the early ’00s, when she and Iclal converted the mansion to a boarding house. There was one marriage, to a butcher who brandished his fist, and a fleeting romance, very sweet, too short and thoroughly heartbreaking. Two things were consistent throughout Gulseren’s life: The fireflies, and her permapuckered mother, who continuously asserts that her daughter is “insane” for being able to see fireflies in the backyard. Gulseren “summons” them by blinking a flashlight, and once danced among them with her beloved father, and laid beneath them in the arms of her lover. They saw the fireflies too, but her mother never did.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The nursing home-flashback structure of HYESF is reminiscent of The Notebook (although it foregoes the overly gauzy romantic stuff), and it employs a Forrest Gumpish manner of framing significant national events within one person’s life story.

Performance Worth Watching: Erkek funnels some significant enthusiasm into playing Gulseren, although the episodic nature of the screenplay tends to work against her, and therefore a deeper understanding of the character.

Memorable Dialogue: Gulceren was a precocious kid in school: “Teachers ask us the sum of the interior angles of a triangle. But I’m trying to figure out the sum of the interior suffering of a human.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: What an odd movie — it’s by turns endearing, annoying, sweet, ridiculous, poignant, and pointless. It sort of asserts that only good people can see fireflies, open-minded dreamer types who can appreciate beauty when it flickers and floats above and around them. That’s cute, sure, but such symbolic sentiment isn’t strong enough glue to hold together this lumpy collection of anecdotes that never finds its focus. Is it a portrait of a progressive woman held back by conservative ideals? Sort of, but it lacks the teeth to be an incisive character study. Take the scene in which Gulseren comes home to Iclal sporting a fresh shiner; she says her marriage to the butcher is over, and her mother asserts that being socked in the eye is no reason to give up on the guy. The moment lacks the dramatic heft it deserves, and shrugs off the abuse as another live-and-learn episode among the many in Gulseren’s life.

The movie is ultimately a shallow quest for light comedy and greeting-card profundity, neither of which consistently takes hold. Its artificiality is abundant in its presentation, which is visually disjointed and tends to embrace the staginess of its source material. Some scenes are arranged so characters are all facing forward; others cut between different angles in an attempt to use techniques of traditional film narratives. The actors tend to mug and project their dialogue as if playing for the back row, which isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker, but it sacrifices the intimacy the story needs to maintain the resonance of a thoughtful character study. I’m not sure what the film is trying to say beyond, hey, life sure is full of ups and downs, so appreciate the fireflies while you can. Erkek’s warmth and wide-eyed zeal is such that it’s easy for us to root for her happiness but we have no idea if she ever found any.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Despite Erkek’s winning performance, Have You Ever Seen Fireflies? is too thematically trivial to be the emotionally intimate story it wants to be.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Have You Ever Seen Fireflies? on Netflix