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Following the road to self-destruction, finding the path to love in Fatih
Akin's Head-On
by anna battista
Turkish-German Cahit (Birol Ünel) is intent on destroying himself:
drinking, taking drugs, fighting in pubs and driving his car into a concrete
wall. As a consequence of his actions, Cahit ends up in a mental institution
where he meets Sibel (Sibel Kekilli). Young, beautiful and Turkish-German
like Cahit, Sibel is in the clinic because she tried to kill herself to
escape her life with her traditional and conservative family. It's
just minutes after they meet that Sibel asks Cahit to marry her so that she
will be able to move out of her family's house and live a free life.
Cahit reluctantly agrees to this marriage of convenience and they eventually
move together.
At the beginning, Cahit and Sibel live like flatmates to a
soundtrack of 1980s music (Depeche Mode among the others) interspersed with
Turkish songs, surrounded by punk images (the door of Cahit's flat is
adorned with a poster of Siouxsie And The Banshees). Their main activity
seems to be spending time in clubs and drinking away their troubles. Sibel
often picks up the men she fancies in the various clubs she visits, while
Cahit has occasional one night stands with his sometimes girlfriend Maren
(Catrin Striebeck). Yet, something slowly and relentlessly changes between
Cahit and Sibel, they actually fall in love. When they realise what's
happening between them it's too late though, jealousy gets in the way
and separates them putting a tragic twist to their existences.
Fatih Akin's Head-On (Gegen die Wand) is a powerful love story that also
manages at times to be funny and romantic. The film, shot in Germany and
Turkey, explores the lives of Turkish immigrants in Hamburg and the loss of
identity (Cahit arouses suspicions in Sibel's family since his Turkish
is not that good), but it's mainly about two lost souls, a man and a
woman who change each other. From the loser he was at the beginning of the
film, Cahit learns to love and live from Sibel; from him Sibel learns to be
happy and free, but also to cry sincere and bitter tears. Ünel and
Kekilli's performances are amazing and realistic: you definitely feel
their emotional pain while watching them interacting on screen.
Akin, born in 1973 in Hamburg from Turkish parents, wrote and directed his
first short feature Sensin - You're The One! (Sensin - Du bist es!) in 1995,
since then his films received many awards, but it's the harrowing and raw
Head-On that won him a deserved Golden Bear at the 54th Berlin Film
Festival, becoming the first German film to take a top prize at
the event in 18 years. If Head On really signals the rebirth of the German
film industry, as many critics suggested, we'd better keep an eye on
Germany.
{www.gegendiewand.de}
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