The poor but earnest working-class Güler family's household is threatened when unscrupolous businessman Cemal Çaliskan attempts to have them evicted, so he can demolish their house and finally have all the land in the area to himself for his own ends. The family isn't going down without a fight, however. Meanwhile, the daughter Alev, unwittingly working at the factory owned by the man making life difficult for everyone, falls for his attractive son Ferit...
Sev Kardeşim is a marginally entertaining romance picture, though not without issues. Getting to the positives first, the acting is fine, with everyone delivering decent performances. Famed local actress Hülya Koçyigit does very well, as do others, such as Münir Özkul, and the iconic laughter of Adile Nasit. Koçyigit and Tarik Akan share pretty good chemistry together when the movie finally gets around to it.
The story is pretty fun to start with, though the whole meet-cute part didn't really go the way I was expecting/hoping, and Alev ends up being an almost unsympathetic character with her actions in manipulating and ensnaring Ferit. Following that, the romance then gets a bit weird and annoying once her actions are discovered, given how both leads act. I'm also a little unsure if the film was perhaps unbalanced in how much story was devoted to the blossoming romance, and how much to the nefarious businessman's plans plus the family's struggle against them. There are long swaths where we seem to go without one or the other. I also felt the movie went on a little too long. It could've naturally wrapped the plot up earlier than it did, yet it keeps going.
The look of Sev Kardeşim is very good, and the film quality has clearly been kept well over the decades, rather than stuffed in a barn occupied by a bucking horse with a grudge against film nitrate. As for the look of the movie itself, it's fine. Being a romance, it's not effects heavy, but what there is is fine. The police station holding cells near the end look pretty funny though. They're the most delightfully coloured jail cells I've seen!
The soundtrack is the best part of the movie, with some scoring, and a really good main theme, sung by Şenay (Yüzbaşıoğlu). The movie certainly likes it, as it plays just about four times! Thankfully at least one of those reprisals is only partial.
One cool thing to mention is how certain scenes here look a lot like Laverne and Shirley! A bunch of spunky working-class women working in a factory, wearing standard overcoats over their snazzy outfits? Sev Kardeşim has that in spades. If you watch parts of this, and scenes of that show, you'll definitely see a similarity. "Typical, then", you think, "Why should I be surprised that this Turkish movie ripped off an American TV series?". Well, perhaps because it predates Laverne and Shirley by four years! Quite a fascinating little coincidence!
On that note, Sev Kardeşim seems like an original story, and while I've seen plenty of Turkish movies so far, only a few have been like that. Most have been pulpy knock-offs, so it was certainly neat seeing something actually its own thing!...
...Yeah, about that...
According to IMDb, Sev Kardeşim is a remake of the Frank Capra movie You Can't Take It With You. Now at first I was disbelieving about this, as 'warm and idealistic relative of heartless businessman falls in love with a woman whose quirky home and/or family is being threatened by said tycoon' is a super common plot, to the point where I barely need to even stretch my arm from where I sit to grab my DVD of the Love Bug movies, the second of which is exactly like that, to a tee. So case closed, these two movies simply have similar stories, as do a hundred others. All sorted!...Well, until I read You Can't Take It With You's wikipedia page anyway. Yeah, Sev Kardeşim is totally a ripoff. Well, let's be generous and keep saying remake...
Sev Kardeşim isn't a great movie, and its ending is more than enough to sink it, but it has its good qualities too. Hülya Koçyigit is a super adorable and plucky lead, the whole proto-Laverne and Shirley aesthetic is great, and it's overall harmless...
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