Live Free or Die

fuck and run: Sibel (Sibel Kekilli, right) flees her Turkish- German family and ends up with Cahit (Birol Ünel).

Head-On's doomed lovers go to extremes, exposing Germany's divided soul.

Head-On

by Sam Adams

"I want to live," says Sibel (Sibel Kekilli). "To live and to dance and to fuck." Considering that she and Cahit (Birol Ünel) meet in a clinic while recovering from their respective suicide attempts, Sibel's stark declaration comes as a surprise, not least because she attaches a meaning to life far greater than mere existence. Drawn to extremes, like Cahit and Head-On's writer-director Fatih Akin, Sibel makes no distinction between death and a life constrained by someone else's rules.

Feeling hemmed-in by her immigrant family, the lithe, mercurial Sibel asks Cahit to marry her — not out of love, but because it's the only way to get out from under her parents' roof. Since he, like she, is a Turk living in Germany, even her tradition-minded parents will be bound to approve; though it takes a few snorts of coke to get them through the wedding, soon Sibel and Cahit are living in his beer can-clogged bedsit.

What follows is the stuff of comedy, though it's rarely played for laughs: Cahit falls for his ersatz bride, who blithely overlooks his simmering jealously until it explodes. The consequences of Cahit's rage send the movie spinning out of Germany and back to Turkey, where the situation isn't resolved so much as dissolved. For Sibel, the return to a homeland she barely remembers is a stygian descent; for Cahit, twice her age and significantly more removed, it's practically an introduction. She kicks against the pricks; he bides his time.

The 31-year-old Akin's fourth feature, Head-On is as desperate as Sibel to demonstrate its freedom, but it's best when it emulates Cahit's battered reflection. Akin is never less original than when he's pretending to rail against boundaries that no longer exist, acting as if the movie's sex/drugs/rock 'n' roll milieu were forbidden territory and not box-office gold.

Head-On's opening reels are a breathless rush, complete with an overhead shot of Cahit's suicidal car crash that feels like something out of a Radiohead video. Somehow the tempo still drags; the pace is brisk, but Akin's going in circles. Cahit keeps passing out drunk on available furniture. Sibel screws another stranger. Rinse, repeat. The movie's ostentatious transgression grows tedious; desperate to impart a tone of pop fatalism, Akin trains his camera on Ünel's doomy swagger and slathers Nick Cave on the soundtrack, apparently unaware that even the dour Australian chanteur is raising a family these days.

Considering that Head-On, like Akin's previous features (and a documentary, I Think of Germany, shown at International House last year), is implicitly concerned with raising the visibility of Germany's Turks, it's not surprising Akin adopts a basically commercial style. The movie's success in Germany has been hailed as a step toward racial tolerance, but it's likely its athletic sex scenes and punk-rock ambience deserve much of the credit. (It couldn't have hurt that the press reported that Kekilli, whom Akin claims to have discovered in a Cologne shopping mall, had previously made several pornographic films.) The movie's German title, Gegen die Wand, means both "against the wall" and "against the wound," a description literalized in Cahit's crash and an up-close shot of Sibel's wrists being sown back together. Akin obviously wants us to feel we're seeing something raw and unfiltered, but only in the rare moments when Kekilli is alone with the camera does the movie feel like it might explode.

Akin opens the movie with a long shot of a Turkish singer standing by the banks of the Bosphorus, begging comparison with the fabulist revels of Emir Kusturica, and his skill for using pop music to extend the mood of a scene bears comparison with Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. But the movie's wildness feels like a pose. Akin reduces Sibel's family to a caricature, with her stern father and brawny brother on one side and her emotionally overwrought but powerless mother on the other. Only in a confrontation between Cahit and Sibel's brother that doesn't go nearly as you expect does Akin depart from cliches that Yiddish cinema beat to death in the 1920s.

Torn between allegiances, Head-On finds a measure of grace once the scene shifts to Turkey, although the journey there is anything but pleasant. Cahit confronts Sibel's cousin, who is hiding her location from him, and stumbling for the words to express his feelings of loss, he abandons his pidgin Turkish for English. The transition is stunning, especially for a viewer who speaks neither Turkish nor German; Cahit's face, unblemished by subtitles, has never seemed so open, so vulnerable. The linguistic shift seems less to signify English's place as a "universal" tongue than a kind of neutral territory, an attempt to place matters of the heart outside the reach of dueling nationalities. It doesn't work, which might be the point, although Head-On's embrace of Hollywood cliche suggests that Akin harbors universal dreams of his own.

Head-On Written and directed by Fatih Akin A Strand release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse