REVIEWED - HEAD-ON/GEGEN DIE WAN: This desperate love story set amid Hamburg's Turkish community was a surprise winner of the Golden Bear at last year's Berlin Film Festival, and it has much to recommend it.
Fiercely energetic and faultlessly acted, Head-On works through some familiar themes - differences between conservative first-generation immigrants and their more integrated children, the marriage of convenience that becomes a love match - without ever losing its edge. It's also drenched in adolescent, gothic angst and features more pretentiously distraught outbursts than a Sisters of Mercy concept album.
Cahit (Birol Ünel), driven to drink and snappiness by the death of his wife, decides to end it all and - as an awfully deep Depeche Mode track blasts out for the first, but, sadly, not last time - races his car into a wall.
While recovering in hospital, he meets Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), who, distressed by the attentions of her domineering parents, has slashed her wrists. In one of the film's several unlikely turns, Sibel persuades Cahit to marry her so that she can escape the nest and develop an independent life.
At first the bride's gentle attempts to reorder her new husband's shabby life - she cuts his hair, buys new furniture - drive him into fits of rage. But gradually Cahit begins to warm to the spirited girl. Thankfully, before the film turns into Green Card, something catastrophic occurs and the tone changes dramatically.
It is difficult to entirely warm to a film that features a scene in which a psychiatrist quotes a line from the pop group The The ("Das Das" he helpfully translates) to a troubled patient. And director Fatih Akin, much of whose record collection gets a noisy airing, is a little too eager to represent despair and anguish through not shaving, wearing black and shouting along to Siouxsie and the Banshees.
That said, Head-On remains gripping throughout and, in its treatment of the community in which the director grew up, feels sincerely felt and carefully observed.
