Head-On Movie Review:


There's a remarkable balance in this film between brutality and compassion--it's often not easy to watch, the characters are all strongly abrasive, and yet we are emotionally gripped to their journey.

Cahit (Unel) is a 44-year-old waste of space, living in drugged-out squalor in Hamburg when he meets the sparky 21-year-old Sibel (Kekilli), who has an intriguing proposal. Basically she blackmails him into marrying her, so she can escape the grip of her Turkish family. Cahit is a Turk, so he's just about acceptable, especially after she cleans him up a bit. As they start to get to know each other, there's a softening between them that might become love. But the tensions and brutality of their subculture make this almost impossible.

Writer-director Akin starkly portrays life in a Turkish community in Germany as something both comforting and terrifying. These people rely on their family and friends, but it can all turn in an instant due to the deep-seated racism around them and the violent insistence on traditional values within the family. In this setting, Akin tells a lively and often hilarious tale of two lost souls. At the start both of them are suicidal nutcases, then through a series of funny and horrific situations, they find both each other and themselves. The filmmaking style is raw and jagged, never flinching away from the gruesome horrors they encounter, but it also has a sweet centre that keeps us captivated.

Unel and Kekilli both bring a strong force of personality to their roles, which makes the wide variety of situations both telling and engaging. And there's a wonderful range of side characters who add depth of meaning to the film--Cahit's semi-girlfriend (Striebeck) and his strict Muslim pal (Kirac), Sibel's divorced cousin in Istanbul (Cumbul) and her hothead brother (Cem Akin). These and other characters weave into a varied tapestry of experiences that makes the film extremely realistic--there's nothing remotely simplistic about this examination of all sides of a culture/subculture. But at its heart, this is a provocative, wrenching, hopeful, full-on love story.



Rich Cline

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