FILM OF THE WEEK
INTERVIEW | review: Gegen die Wand (Head-on) |
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| Written by Boyd van Hoeij | |
| Thursday, 08 April 2004 | |
 Cahit, a fourty-something Turkish immigrant in Germany, is a desperate man. He has a lousy job picking up left-behind glasses in a concert venue andspends all of his lousy pay (and probably more) on alcohol. It is not really clear whether he drinks to forget or whether his drinking has taken him even beyond forgetting why he started to drink in the first place. One night, he gets involved in a brawl at a bar and gets thrown out: Cahit has had it with this world and drives his car head-on into a wall. The law of Murphy says that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and so it does: Cahit finds himself in a hospital with only his neck injured.Sibel is a desperate woman. She is a twenty-year year old daughter of Turkish immigrants in Germany and craves to live the way she thinks German girls her age live: fucking around, drinking and doing drugs. She is sick of her conservative Muslim-family with their morals and habits that do not suit the country where they live: she wants to move out but she can only do so by getting married. She sees no way out and cuts her wrists, but as Murphy's would have it: she ends up in the hospital with only minor cut-wounds since she cut her wrists in the wrong direction. She is lectured by her father, brother and mother in the hospital cafeteria where she overheard by Cahit; they make contact and the first thing she asks him is to marry her. He answers: I like guys. She says: that does not matter, I do not want to sleep with you. Cahit and Sibel get married and even move in together. Cahit is at first far from convinced and Sibel tries to help by finding a job as a hair-dresser and finding them an apartment that is slightly more presentable than Cahit's room in an abandoned factory. Sibel, liberated at last, sleeps with all the men she can get her hands on, whilst Cahit drinks again and has casual sex with Sibel's hairdresser boss. They pretend as if their lives did not change, but under the surface they know that they have: neither feels completely abandoned by the world anymore. Twists of fate and acts of love will take them to their homeland, though not their villages of birth but that part of Turkey that is also Europe, balancing between East and West (like they did in Germany): Istanbul. The final act of Gegen die Wand takes place here, and the proceedings are so lifelike up to its logical conclusion that it is almost incredible that it has been committed to film. Films never end like this, though life certainly does. The script by writer-director Fatih Akin, himself a German of Turkish decent, feels as if, (if he did not actually go through everything himself), he has had some close friends who have been there. It seems taken directly from life, with dialogue sparse but densely meaningful, switching between Turkish and German often in the same sentence. Gegen die Wand is neither apologetic nor overly dramatic or sentimental, it knows how to keep the right tone throughout the film and this helps the audience believe that these characters, marginalised between two cultures, could actually exist. Both Birol Ünel (as Cahit) and, Sibel Kekkili (as Sibel) deliver great performances, with Mr Ünel especially impressive, acting so convincingly as though to say: there is no other way to portray Cahit, I am him. Gegen die Wand' was awarded the Golden Bear for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival, praising it for its portrayal of the difficulties of immigrant-life. I cannot but agree with this praise and recommend it strongly. |
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