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Jul 6, 2008 6:56 AM CST |
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Faith Akin is a second-generation Turk in Germany. His film Head On, which won the Golden Bear at the 2004 Berlin International Film Festival, deals with two characters who are also second-generation Turks. Cahit is a sullen, angry drunk. His only ambition seems to be to kill himself with alcohol. He meets Sibel in a mental hospital where he winds up after smashing his car into a brick wall and surviving. Sibel is suicidal. She spies on Cahit in a waiting room and comes directly to the point. She asks him, “Will you marry me?” Cahit puts her off, but she is insistent. They sneak out of the mental hospital for a drink. As the two—and we, in turn —start to relax, Sibel grabs a beer bottle, breaks it, and swipes it across her wrist. Behind Sibel’s suicidal madness is her family’s traditional code of behavior that Sibel, as a good Muslim girl, must follow. If she continues with her free-wheeling, independent ways, she risks being killed by her older brother. For her, a marriage of convenience—especially to a Turk—is the perfect way out of an impossible situation. In return for this marriage of convenience, Sibel promises to keep Cahit well supplied in alcohol. There is an uneasy and awkward visit by Cahit to the family to get the father’s approval. The wedding follows. The marriage starts out just as they had conceived it. Sibel goes out dancing every night and goes home with a succession of strangers. She spends their wedding night in the arms of another man. Cahit drinks and occasionally has sex with his long-time lover, Maren, a hairdresser. She is a tough cookie who is very demanding in bed, and there’s a great scene of Cahit and Maren playing nude backgammon. But a strange thing happens. Cahit’s apartment is a pigpen which Sibel cleans up. He responds to it by saying “It’s like a chick bomb exploded in here.” But then she picks up a strange guy and sleeps with him, and he trashes the apartment, shooting their wedding picture with an air rifle. Something has changed between these two outsiders. They grow to accept each other. Sibel refuses a suitor by telling him, “I am a married Turkish woman.” All of this plot description mis-characterizes the nature of the film. Most of Head On is, in fact, structured like a comedy about a very odd couple. Ultimately, this is what makes it so powerful and devastating. Both Cahit and Sibel are likeable characters, but they are likeable because we see and understand their huge flaws. At the same time, despite communicating in German, they bear the weight of coming from foreign cultures that have restrictive expectations of their behavior. Neither Cahit nor Sibel can fulfill these expectations. But they have trouble breaking free—finding their own identity and strength. More than anything, they are driven by loneliness, by self-hatred, and pain. This lends Head On an incredible intensity. Akin said in an interview that he did not want his film to represent the whole Turkish minority. Both of his characters were outsiders in this community. The girl is crazy; she wants to kill herself, yet she tries to fight against the dogmatic pressure from her parents. Yet even the family is very assimilated. Sibel’s brother accepts Cahit as a brother-in-law even if he is a nobody because he loves Sibel and because he is good for his sister. Cahit, by turn, barely speaks Turkish any more. All this gives Head On a universality. The characters in Head On would easily be interchangeable for any two people thrown together by circumstance or convenience, who struggle to escape, and in their desperate search for their self-identity and freedom, grow to love each other and perhaps to even find a place and space where they can begin their lives all over again. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
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