HEAD ON  (Highly Recommended)

A film that opens with its two lead characters attempting to commit suicide doesn’t exactly promise to be an evening of romantic snicks and giggles but to ignore this passionate, uncompromising and brutal love story by director Fatih Akin would be a grave mistake. Like a twisted fairy tale, Head On takes a conventional romantic-comedy storyline and spins it into something compellingly unexpected.

Turkish-born Cahit (Birol Unel) is a forty- something punk rock veteran who picks up empties at a rock club for cash. Grizzled, drunk and hostile, he lives in a Hamburg flat so filthy Sid Vicious would have second thoughts. His face is the craggy ruin of a man who has experienced crushing heartbreak. One night, angry and depressed, he drives his car head-on into a wall and after surviving the crash, finds himself in a psychiatric facility.

There he meets a beautiful and suicidal young Turkish woman named Sibel (Sibel Kekilli). Living under the thumb of her repressive Muslim family, she longs for the sexually liberated, hedonistic life of the modern German woman. Out of desperation she begs Cahit (in their very first meeting) to marry her – a marriage of convenience, of course -- so that she can be free of her father and violent brother’s grip. Repelled by the proposal, he rejects her offer with startling bloody consequences.

Eventually, for reasons he can’t even explain, Cahit agrees to help her. Cleaning up and using his best friend Seref (the excellent Guven Kirac) to pose as an uncle, he courts Sibel’s family and the two are wed in a raucously traditional ceremony. Sibel then moves into the apartment and they proceed to lead separate and reasonably tolerant lives. Over time, Cahit rediscovers his passion for life and an inevitable spark of attraction blossoms between these mismatched roommates. Soon jealousies, love and unexpected complications arise.

Originally called Against The Wall in its native Germany, both titles are the perfect metaphor for the violent impact love, culture and circumstance have on Cahit and Sibel. Though Head On is deeply romantic, writer/director Akin has more than a simple (albeit gritty) love story in mind. He’s interested in the friction caused by European and Muslim values, depicting it as an ever-present force that shapes the character’s choices without ever becoming the focus of their story. Alienated from both cultures, Cahit and Sibel careen through life as damaged souls, testing the tensile strength of love with their self-destructive impulses.

The brutality --sexual, emotional and physical-- of Head On’s final act takes us by surprise and Akin comes dangerously close to pushing the melodrama too far. And yet, though the story spirals into deeper darkness, our investment in the lovers’ relationship intensifies. We can’t help but hope that these two wounded souls will help each other find the grace they so desperately deserve.

Akin is a director who understands how small intimate details can shape the greater meaning of a story. He gives all his characters wonderfully revealing moments that bring with them insight and poignancy. In an early scene, a drunken Cahit returns to his squalid flat and pulls out a rumpled tuxedo and photos of a woman we’ll never know. He puts the jacket on and evaluates himself in the reflection of a dusty television screen, trying to imagine himself as anyone’s groom. In another, the self-exiled Sibel curls on her friend’s couch, watching a women’s weightlifting competition on television. With barely a whisper, she urges a Turkish competitor (also named Sibel) with such a sense of desperate hope that it breaks your heart.

Akin is blessed with a cast of astonishingly committed actors, breathing life into characters that live on well past the credits. Sibel Kekilli terrifically balances the impish sexuality of youth with the tragic vulnerability of a woman molested by fate. Shockingly, she is an amateur, her only film experience having been a handful of porn videos. Unel is simply outstanding, convincing us that beneath the skuzzy, violent surface of Cahit there is something hopeful and even noble. His performance is haunting and unforgettable.

There are several musical interludes, Turkish musicians playing sorrowful ballads along a waterfront in Istanbul, which act as chapter breaks in Head On’s narrative. It’s a conceit borrowed from Lars Von Trier’s Breaking The Waves; a similarly brutal love story. Akin may have hoped to accentuate the film’s sense of displacement and longing with these exotic yet oddly familiar sounding songs but the gesture comes off as forced and unnecessary.

Head On is not an easy film to watch. It’s a wrenching examination of the terrible and chaotic power of love and its ability to transform even the most wretched soul. Fatih Akin’s unapologetically bittersweet film rushes head long into the viewer. You may be tempted to flinch and turn away. Don’t. If you surrender to the velocity of its heartache (and believe in the transformative nature of cinema) you will emerge from the theater a different person than you went in.