"Head On"

The displaced lovers in this vital, moving Turkish-German romance are a little bit rock 'n' roll -- and have their own sense of country.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Jan 28, 2005 | German writer-director Fatih Akin's vital and affecting romantic drama "Head On" may be set in Germany and Turkey, but it really takes place in the nowheresville of displaced lovers -- it's the kind of picture that makes the world feel smaller than we ever imagined it could.

This is the story of two unlikely (are there any other kind?) lovers, Sibel and Cahit. Cahit (the wonderful Birol Ünel) is a 40-ish Turkish-born down-and-out rock 'n' roll guy who has been living in Hamburg for most of his life -- he speaks lousy Turkish, and even then only when it's absolutely necessary: When a rigidly conservative Turkish character asks him what he did with his native tongue, as if to suggest that he'd hidden it deep inside himself in shame, Cahit shoots back, "Threw it away!"

Cahit has a lowly job collecting empty beer bottles at a club, and he's got the face of a guy who's drunk deep from the trough of rock 'n' roll, to the point where its transformative, youth-bestowing qualities have started to work in reverse: With his rough, scarred features and haunted eyes, he looks like a cross between Iggy Pop, Paul Westerberg and Billy Bob Thornton.

We don't immediately know what's troubling Cahit, but it's not wholly shocking when he accidentally on purpose drives his car into a wall. He grumbles at being forced to spend time recuperating in a mental clinic, and is further annoyed when an effervescently pretty fellow patient there, 23-year-old Sibel (Sibel Kikilli), proposes marriage to him on the basis of little more than having seen his face and recognized his last name as being Turkish.

Sibel has attempted suicide, and little wonder: Her parents, Turkish immigrants, consist of a strict, opaque father and a stern but silently sympathetic mother. Her brother, keeper of the family honor, threatens to kill her if she disgraces the family again. (Considering the scars on Sibel's wrists, the twisted logic of his threat is one of the movie's first grim, dark jokes.) Sibel, to put it simply, likes sex, possibly too much for her own good. She wants to marry a Turkish man to get the family off her back, so she can make love to whomever she wants, whenever she wants. She proposes as much to the surly, incommunicative Cahit: She'll live with him, keep house for him and cook for him, but their relationship will be strictly platonic.

Cahit is repelled at first -- he may be a drunkard, but he's a common-sense drunkard, and we can see that Sibel's request offends his ingrained sense of propriety. He also has a secret heartbreak in his past, something we can tell just by looking at him, and not just because of his constant brooding: Cahit has the kind of face you could read with your fingers -- his suffering has worn deep into every groove and crevice. But before long, and for reasons not even he can explain (to give reasons would betray the very essence of romance), Cahit agrees to help Sibel. And from there, the relationship between Sibel and Cahit takes the expected dark alleys and avenues, and a few detours that we never see coming.

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