It's time to talk about transnational cinema. Also, sex, drugs, and punk rock. Welcome to Fatih Akin's Head-On!Institutionalized for attempting suicide, Cahit (Birol Unel) meets Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), a young Turkish-German woman desperate to escape the controlling ways of her family. She propositions Cahit with a very simple plan: they get married in name only and both continue to do precisely whatever the hell they want. After a period of consideration, Cahit agrees. Newly freed, Sibel indulges all her appetites and Cahit finds himself unwillingly drawn out of his misanthropic depression by her sparkly optimism. And also her staggering hotness. But can their relationship of convenience survive actually falling for each other?
Have you ever seen someone that was physically unattractive but you just knew they could fuck you into the ground? Birol Unel looks like the weird laboratory-grown love child of Mick Jagger and Javier Bardem. When you first see him, (if you're me) you're like "Gross. Who let that hobo on set?" Then, over the course of the film, he somehow gets progressively hotter. It is a very strange experience.
Akin was influenced by Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese as well as Ranier Werner Fassbinder's Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and it shows. This is violent, fast, and bloody, filmed both in Hamburg and Istanbul with dialogue in Turkish and German. It fixates on the experiences of German residents of Turkish background and their alienation from both worlds. (Up until 2000, German citizenship did not automatically confer on people born in Germany if their parents were not German citizens, meaning that if your parents came to Germany as guest workers from Turkey, then stayed and had you, you were considered a Turkish citizen, not German, and were not conferred any of the rights of German citizens. It's called jus sanguinis. The reform makes it easier to naturalize but is still not automatic.)
This was my favorite film of the whole semester.
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