The dissipated hero is a sadly rare bird these days, kept alive largely by the Kaurismäki brother and then only in its male manifestation. That alone is a reason to welcome writer-director Fatih Akin’s Head On (Gegen die Wand) to American theaters, after it won first prize at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival.
Shot in Akin’s native Hamburg (where he was born to Turkish parents), Head On follows the collision between 40-year-old Cahit (Birol Ünel), a drunken ex-punk rocker, and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), a pretty 21-year-old. Both are of Turkish descent, but seem to have precious little else in common. Aside from drawing as few sober breaths as he can possibly manage, Cahit, who picks up empties in a nightclub for a living, has forgotten most Turkish he ever knew and keeps his social circle limited to one friend and one casual lover. Sibel, on a the other hand, comes from a strict, tight knit Turkish family – so naturally, she wants to marry Cahit as soon as she meets him.
A clue to the strange attraction comes from the meeting’s background: A state asylum, where each has been temporarily incarcerated following suicide attempts. Cahit drove a car into a wall in an attempt as offhanded as most everything else he does; he doesn’t need treatment so much as another drink. But Sibel desperately wants to leave her family and lead the life of a Western woman: Drink, dance, and, er, make love as she puts it. So, she pleads with and finally prevails upon Cahit to enter into a marriage of convenience. She’ll cook and clean up his apartment and they’ll spend their nights apart.
Anyone who has seen any movie ranging from a melodrama to a screwball comedy can figure out what happens next: Yes, they do begin to have feelings for one another. But what’s marvelous about Akin’s film is that even when you know what’s coming, you never know exactly what guise it will come in. Just when the two are on the verge of making love, Sibil pulls back. Her feelings for Cahit are deep, she explains, far deeper than those she has for the men she sleeps with. She simply can’t put Cahit on their lower plane, and so puts an end to any thought of their lovemaking.
This is typical of the unusually wide emotional range Akin’s film is able to ford. Despite the attempted suicides, much of the film’s beginning and middle is comic, sometimes broadly so; later, romance becomes interlaced with the comedy, and then desperate drama, laden with the possibility and realization of violence enters the picture. Finally, everything concludes with a profound sense of peace (which, of course, is not the same as happiness).
Throughout nearly all this, Sibil attains an apotheosis through excess. At first, he forays into Hamburg’s nightlife seem no more than the naughty exuberance of a typical young woman. But soon enough, her sexual and drunken abandonment becomes compulsive. She scares even Cahit who, in his smitten state, has begun to clean himself up and develop jealousies over Sibil’s multiple attractions.
That wide range we mentioned keeps us from forming easy judgments about Sibil’s behavior. Yes, it’s self-destructive, but is it only self-destructive? The young woman has few alternatives, after all. Certainly her family has no interests in doing anything but marrying her off to some sexist Turkish youth. When Sibil finds herself in a straight job, she soon finds herself butting up against the strict limits of middle-class ambition. In a sense, the only route to freedom she has is through mad indulgence, and so she takes it.
Cleverly, Akin posits the opposite for Cahit, for whom indulgence has been a dead end. This parallelism sounds terribly schematic, but it’s not in the least. This young director (he was only 30 when he made his film), leaves the impression that he merely stumbled on Cahit and Sibil at crucial moments in their lives and was somehow able to film them in crisis.
How hair-raising for them. How rewarding for us.