Cast: Birol Unel (Cahit Tomaruk), Sibel Kekilli (Sibel)
Directed by: Fatih Akin
Release date: 11 March 2004

“I wanna live…I wanna dance…I wanna fuck”,

Sibel and Cahit meet in a hospital after failed suicide attempts. Cahit drove his car into a wall. Sibel slashed her wrists. They are both Turkish immigrants in Germany, part of the invisible, unwelcome, teeming workforce.

‘Head-on’ is less of a movie and more of a simultaneously fascinating and harrowing crash towards oblivion. In parts it gets melodramatic. But that doesn’t matter for a movie such as this. It pulses with love and life. It bleeds, it sears its way into the viewer’s heart and mind.

Cahit cleans tables in a pub, spends his days in a drunken daze. Once in a while he has a perfunctory fuck-session with a hairdresser. He is way past even being a loser bum. He has basically stopped living. He is somehow managing to drag around whatever fragments remain of his life.

Sibel comes from a conservative Muslim family. Her brother broke her nose. Because he saw her holding hands with some guy in the street. She craves freedom. She sees marriage to Cahit as her route to escape from the stifling captivity of her family’s tradition and religion. Cahit is double her age .But he would be acceptable to her family as he is a Turk.

Initially Cahit spurns her advances. But she is persistent. She demonstrates her seriousness by slashing her wrists a second time, with a beer bottle in front of a crowd in a pub. Finally, Cahit relents.

He goes to Sibel’s father to ask for his daughter’s hand. He is accompanied by a friend posing as an uncle. He ensures that the chocolates he’s taking as a gift do not contain alcohol. When Sibel’s wary and suspicious brother asks him about his ‘not too good’ Turkish, he replies, “I threw it away”.

Sibel and Cahit get married. We get more than an inkling that no good is going to come of this union of two lost souls. They get coked up to cope with the festivities. On the wedding night, Cahit throws Sibel out of the house when she asks him about his former wife. Sibel goes to a bar and leaves with the bartender.

Sibel feels she has that she has finally been liberated of all shackles. She dresses up every night, goes to discos and clubs and sleeps with the first guy she meets. During the day, she fixes Cahit’s house, cuts his hair and cooks and cleans for him. Cahit realizes slowly that he is falling in love with her, with her beauty and spirit. But he was the one who pushed her away.

And she also can’t let him sleep with her now. As that would make them husband and wife. And the entire point of her ‘marriage’ would be defeated.

In spite of themselves they get close, they begin to care. But then fate intervenes.

Their love story shoots off along entirely an unexpected path. Suffering is inflicted, piled on till the pain becomes unbearable. Still the unconventional bittersweet ending finds some kind of redemption for both Sibel and Cahit.

Sibel and Cahit are not exactly likable characters. They are on an auto self-destruct mode. But their desperate blundering search for meaning in their abysmal lives is somehow deeply affecting.

Shot in the grimy working class suburbs of Hamburg, ‘Head-on’ puts before our eyes the lives of yet another community of people of no land. And in the meantime it tells a love-story, one which is blisteringly raw and brutal…the very anti-thesis of romance.

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