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Regular readers should expect longer pieces in this space on a weekly basis, including interviews, festival reports and extended reviews. Starting this week, the Pride, Unprejudiced blog will have shorter reviews of movies, DVDs and books on film each day as well as occasional commentary. And, of course, Movie City Indie has daily updates on what best expresses the independent spirit in filmmaking around the world, whether the stories are fiction or nonfiction, small or large. Comments and tips are welcomed, as always, at pride@moviecitynews.com.

Consummation

Love is bad, except when it's bad for you, and then it's very, very good. And it can also be assertive and overwhelming and inspire sudden geysers of blood, as German director Fatih Akin's vital romance Head-On (Gegen die Wand) (*** ½), emphatically demonstrates. Head On, the original title of which alludes to a car crash as well as more literally to foolishly banging one's head against the wall, is a powerful ode to l'amour fou and the heritage-of-no-heritage. The characters are Germans, but will always suffer added appellations, hyphens of condescension, no matter where they were born and how many decades they live there as citizens.

Akin's story starts in the backstreets of Hamburg, disoriented and disorienting, leading to the head-on-into-a-wall car crash the title alludes to. It lifts off a few scenes in, when two feral strangers converge at a mental health center. Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), in her very early 20s, is the manic, sexual child of a conservative Turkish immigrant family who will do anything to get out from under her father's roof, including tentative attempts at suicide. Inside, she meets, cajoles, coerces the past-40 Cahit (Birol Unel), who's survived the earlier car crash, attitude intact. Cahit's a lonely, long-in-the-bottle German-born Turk with a morosely handsome/beaten Paul Westerberg-meets-Michael Hutchence face, whose job, in an example of Akin's sly joking, is to clean up after-hours at a club called "The Factory." (Once a gastarbeiter, always a guest worker, du weiss?)

The action is interspersed with neo-Brechtian (or perhaps neo-Parajanovian) tableaux of a traditional Turkish band (six men and one woman singer) playing on the banks of the Bosporus in Istanbul, the blue dome of St. Sophia majestic behind them on the boundary that separates Asia and Europe, and it's weirdly affecting, as well a sinuous hint of tradition that wends through the heads of Akin's exhilarated, agitated couple. Kekilli is small, furtive, with a regal face: darting dark eyes and a gorgeous, bumpy nose, with nearly the cliché of a Cleopatra profile, yet until she makes her imperative sexual overtures, almost a girl-next-door type. (And beware after she's ordered her second lemon-and-gin.) Hair short or long, Unel remains shaggy, every pore of his features lived-in and stomped-upon. They're mismatched, but she insists that they marry, a marriage of convenience (mostly hers). It can be platonic. He can continue his ways, she'll continue hers.

In four films (including A Short Sharp Shock and Im Juli), the 31-year-old German-born director has developed a vigorous post-Scorsese eclecticism, of simplicity without elegance, and in Head On, a sweet plethora of the heart's havoc, rich with emotional extremes and dramatic ambivalence. Damage does not have to demolish this soul: this is one of the equivocal messages we're left with.

The great cross-cultural success of Head-On in Germany means it struck similar sparks as the torrid Israeli green card comedy Late Marriage and Mathieu Kassovitz's La haine (1995) got in France. Head On also holds a powerful underlying metaphor so long as the marriage remaining unconsummated, despite the drinking and drug use and wildly promiscuous sex swirling through their lives. Like everything in their nights and days, fucking is small-scale combat and turf is not easy to let go of. Always a Turk, never a German: there's the lifelong lack of consummation for these characters and for people like them. Her wrists seething with red, Sibel can shout, almost joyfully, "I want to live! I want to live and fuck and dance!" She remains a romantic: "I can't, I can't do it, if we do, then I'm your wife, and you're my husband, you understand?" But answers do not come so readily; self-destruction and adrenaline rush does not suffice. (Still, Cahit's exhilarated by the taste of the chase: "She's bewitched me!")

Despite how dour this may make the movie sound (and there are brutal moments I've not hinted at), Head-On is also a funny, sexy movie, in its own dark fashion, and both Sibel and Cahit (as well as the performances by Kekilli and Unel) are complex human beings. Akin steeps it all in a songbook for the self-dramatizing, like "Temple of Love" by Sisters of Mercy (with vocals by Ofra Haza), the Birthday Party ("Ho Ho"), and a couple of pertinent plays of Depeche Mode's "I Feel You." We get even a therapist who asks Cahit if he's heard of "The The." "The Thuh?" gets no reply. "Das Das?" the doctor asks again, getting only a shake of Cahit's shaggy head. There are seductions for the eye as well as the ear, and even the belly: there's a fast-cut but lusciously detailed scene of Sibel cooking for Cahit, and Akin's sensual attention to the preparation of a biber dolmasi, a stuffed pepper dish, culminates with Sibel tonguing a bit of fruit sweetness from the tip of a carving knife.

Head-On is not an ethnographic documentary, not an overt social commentary, but there are mischievous scenes of excess at the couple's traditional Turkish wedding, and cultural misunderstandings throughout. One of the more intriguing scenes, coming late in the story, after Sibel has left Cahit behind to move to Istanbul, finds him trying to find the words to talk to her successful cousin, a young Turkish career woman working at a four-star hotel. There's a small run of English as if these multilingual characters in this soulless, streaked-with-light penthouse restaurant required that language instead of German or Turkish. As the multilingual mind meanders, it might dream in a mother tongue but speaks in what language the emotion or transaction seems most suited. What words most suit the border bashing, boundary crashing, commerce of the heart than sullen, cracked English?

[In an odd pairing I saw in a Greek video shop window recently, Head On was paired with Wicker Park, the DVD cover of which shares a similar sexual position with Akin's genuinely sexual story.]

April 12, 2004

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