Friday, April 20
Head On
dir. Faith Akin, TURKEY 2004

Cahit is a German Turk at his late 30's. He has given up with his life after his beloved wife's death, and he's living a miserable life right in the core of cocaine and excessive drinking. One night, he semi-intentionally crashes into a wall, and barely survives. At the hospital he's taken to, he meets a girl, Sibel, another German Turk who's tried to commit suicide. She's sick and tired of her family's ultra-traditional issues, and asks Cahit to carry out a white marriage with her out of the blue, so that she can become a married woman and get rid of her family's revolting pressure. Cahit is turned off by the idea at first, but then he agrees to take part in this plan. As Sibel tells him straightaway that she's interested in absolute freedom involving other men and he agrees, they live as roommates with separate private lives for a while. Then things take a different turn, and they're no longer two indifferent roommates. But their love story won't be anywhere as simple as any other...

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When you're making a graphic film about the lower depths of a large city, you can either romanticize details and characters or spit them out with harsh, unsparing candor. "Head-On" does both.

It's a brutally convincing movie about two hell-bent young Turkish-German lovers dancing on the edge of destruction in a Hamburg underworld of drugs and casual sex. Yet it's also compassionate and even tender. There's a strange lyricism and despair in writer-director Fatih Akin's taut, driving evocation of the love beneath the dangerous passions of his main characters: drunken, brawling stage worker Cahit Tomruk (Birol Unel) and his out-of-control "wife," Sibel Guner (Sibel Kekilli).

Akin plunges us violently into a foreign landscape (for Americans), then makes it real, vivid and heart-breaking. He deals with cultural/generational clash here, one of the major issues of contemporary life around the world, with terrific immediacy and savage emotional punch. With its smashing rock score and searing cinematography (by Rainer Klausmann), this film's overall effect is often something like the head-on crash Cahit took into the wall at the movie's start. "Head-On" jolts you awake and leaves you reeling. - Michael Wilmington, ChicagoTribune.com