HEAD-ON
Directed & Written by: Fatih Akin.
Produced by: Stefan Schubert & Ralph Schwingel.
Director of Photography: Rainer Klausmann.
Edited by: Andrew Bird.
Released by: Strand Releasing.
Language: German & Turkish, with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: Germany. 123 min. Not Rated.
With: Birol Ünel, Sibel Kekilli, Catrin Striebeck & Güven Kiraç.

Nothing that the lead characters do is in half-measures. After a night of carousing and fighting, drunken and unkempt Cahit (the deadpan Birol Ünel), aims and crashes his car head-on into a wall. Recovering in a Hamburg clinic, he's approached by a young woman, who asks, "Are you Turkish? Would you marry me?" Sibel (Sibel Kekilli, with a kilo-watt smile) has also tried to kill herself. An unmarried daughter to devout Turkish-speaking Muslims, she sees in Cahit a chance to get her parents off her back and live life independently, being Cahit's wife in name only. When he firmly turns her down, she slits her wrist with a broken bottleneck, splattering blood on Cahit's face. Giving in to her campaign, he's angry to find the wedding is much more formal and bigger than she promised. Their banter is blunt: He-"You lying c***."; She-"Yeah, that's me." After the anxiety of the wedding and reception, they bond over cocaine.

In his forties, Cahit can hardly speak his native tongue ("I hate all that Turkish crap") and makes his living collecting bottles, while Sibel is both an obedient daughter and club-hopping party girl. With a refreshing sense of humor, both leads are so disarming that the gritty melodrama and predictable downward spiral is camouflaged.

Referring to her threatening family, Sibel mentions her brother had broken her nose. But Head-On is less a critique of male-dominated Islamic culture than a focus on two people who are much more alike than they realize. For more pointed commentary, there's Coline Serreau's Chaos, as well as Forty Square Meters of Germany, centering on a Turkish woman forced into an abusive marriage.

Abrasively in your face, at times Head-On goes overboard in its attempt to be hard-hitting. Like the film's odd couple, it doesn't know when to say when. Realizing that she has bewitched him, Cahit smashes a glass with his hand (yet more blood) to emphasize his point. A depressed Sibel, drugged out and staggering on a dance floor, douses herself with booze not once but twice. People don't take a beating, they're pummeled. Head-On is almost a musical with its mixture of punk, hip-hop, doo-wop, and several interludes of a Turkish folk group along the Bosporus. With a poster of Siouxsie and the Banshees in Cahit's apartment and the closing song of Talk, Talk's "Life's What You Make It," the '80s are alive and kicking. Thanks to the soundtrack and the fast pace, the film is exuberant until the muted third act. The prolonged conclusion comes off as static in comparison to the rest of the film. Its change of tone is like going through withdrawal. Kent Turner
January 28, 2005