head on

After a few glasses of a sublime Faugères, I sat down tonight to watch "Head on". This movie, made by the Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin, had won the Golden Bear, the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, in 2004, and I had read glowing reviews on several occasions.

"Head on" showed on Arte, the Franco-German TV station that fills its niche with culture and is usually the more aloof the more popular culture is. They can be trusted on showing films that no one else wants to present, and often those that no one wants to see really. In artistic self-delusion, they're happily and barely scraping by. They're manna for the excentric, and this time they hit the jackpot.

Simultaneous French subtitles and two narrators that sometimes corresponded and other times didn't over mostly synchronized French but frequently Turkish lines filled the movie with an energy that would have yanked a drunk from the gutter, and there were plenty of drunks in the movie. I sat on my sofa like supercharged instead of calmly letting the Faugères sedate me, trying to keep up with too many sensations being hurled at me by a small glowing box.

The story is quickly told. A Turkish-German girl suffering from traditional Turkish values and a twenty-year older Turkish-German loser, both recently defeated in their suicide attempts, meet in a nuts-clinic and decide to get married, mostly to escape their respective miseries. They happily live their separate (sexual) lives, but slowly grow to each other. People die, people go to jail, people run off to Istanbul, people get raped and, shortly thereafter, beaten up in the streets, all over a thumping soundtrack. Turn up the volume and lose yourself in the rush.

As if guided by fate, the lovers are reunited for one last night of mad joy, before being left to weep over lost opportunites when a blunt future with no place for both of them kicks the happy end into the Bosporus. And slowly, at first almost imperceptibly, the bus leaves the lot and soon the city. Are you strong enough?

Now get up and go get the movie already. Don't say I didn't tell you.