Head-On

Synopsis: After driving his car head-on into a wall in a failed suicide attempt, 40 year old Turkish/German Cahit (Birol Unel) ends up in a psychiatric rehab ward, where he meets Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), nearly half his age and also suicidal. Desperate to escape her repressive Turkish Muslim upbringing, she begs Cahit to marry her, and so a platonic marriage of convenience ensues. But as Cahit begins to fall in love, Sibel pursues a wild life, and jealousy brings more tragedy into their lives.

Watching this study of a couple of self-destructive individuals and their relationship is a lot like watching the sequel to the Aussie classic Dogs In Space, only the Michael Hutchence character is now in his mid-forties, Turkish and living in Hamburg. What!! See Akin's film and you'll know what I mean.

Head-On centres on a down-at-heel, superannuated never-goin'-to-grow-up Euro-punk rocker, Cahit, who, in the best tradition of cinematic fiction, is suddenly thrown into a relationship with a good-looking young woman. The twist in the tale of how they fall in love is that they are both angry and very trying people given to outbursts of violence, against each over, themselves or anyone who crosses them in a bad moment.

As a depiction of such individuals and their relationship the film is, cinematic conveniences aside, quite credible, unlike Yann Samuell's exercise in black whimsy, Love Me If You Dare (2003) which told the story of destructive romantic co-dependence in a less-convincing fairy tale format. In Akin's film we find out that Sibel is the twisted product of double-messaging Turkish patriarchalism that both pedestalizes and diminishes women. Of Cahit's background psychology we are told less but he seems to be irrevocably scarred by his first wife's death, presumably the act of an unjust God. We are pretty much left to infer Cahit's philosophical conclusions from this but he is equally antipathetic to his cultural inheritance. That both characters live in second-class sub-cultural estrangement from their roots, of which we are periodically reminded by the insertion of a troupe of musicians singing a traditional Turkish song on the banks of the Bosphorus, provides the broader explanation for their behaviour. The pair, are in other words, the Sid and Nancy of the Turkish-German diaspora.

The performances by the two leads are intense without being histrionic and writer/director Fatih Akin keeps the story moving, never over-playing or gratuitously extending scenes. Yet the fact that it has been so successful on the European, and particularly German, film festival circuit is somewhat misleading as to its significance. Whether the fact that Kekilli has earned the film a no-doubt commercially gratifying frisson of titillation with the revelation that she is a former porn-star is relevant to the film's popularity I know not, whether the other contenders were of inferior quality (after all, how will our own Somersault fare in years to come?), likewise.

Head-On is a well-made but not remarkable film, consistently engaging but considerably more conventional than its characters appear to be and mainly enjoyable as a distaff love story...if that's your thing.

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