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8. ART & INDUSTRY:
IMMIGRANT SONGS
by Amy Taubin
Fatih Akin's HEAD-ON
and
Daniel Burman's LOST EMBRACE
Head-On
Winner of the 2004 European Film Award and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Fatih Akin's Head-On also swept the German Academy awards. So is Akin the new Fassbinder? Hardly, although certain comparisons come to mind. Head-On mixes melodrama and social critique, punctuating a grimly tempestuous love story set in Hamburg's Turkish community with Brechtian theatrical flourishes in the form of traditional Turkish tunes, played in front of an Istanbul riverscape.
Akin, a German of Turkish descent, attracted attention in Europe with his first feature, Short Sharp Shock (97), made when he was in his mid-twenties. He followed with In July (00) and Solino (02). The idea for his fourth feature Head-On was suggested by a Turkish friend who wanted to him to marry her so she could become a permanent resident in Germany. In Head-On, Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), a recent high-school drop out, is so desperate to escape her conservative Turkish family that she slits her wrists. In a Hamburg psychiatric hospital she meets Cahit (Birol Ünel), an older, similarly suicidal Turkish immigrant who has impulsively tried to end it by driving his car into a wall. Sibel asks Cahit to marry her, knowing that her parents will accept him because he's Turkish and that's all that matters to them. Cahit agrees, perhaps just to keep her from killing herself, but more likely because he senses in her a kindred spirit who also can help pay the rent. It is supposed to be a marriage in name only, leaving both of them totally free, and in fact, on their wedding night, Sibel loses her virginity to the bartender in the club where Cahit works as a janitor. In the weeks that follow, Sibel lets her hair down (literally), has her navel pierced, acquires a taste for drugs, and goes home with a different guy every night. She's drunk on freedom, where Cahit has only booze and rough sex with his on and off girlfriend to obliterate his pain. But, inevitably, whatever attraction they initially felt resurfaces and they fall madly in love with disastrous consequences. In fit of jealousy, Cahit attacks one of Sibel's one-night-stands and unintentionally kills him. He goes to jail and Sibel, having promised to wait for him, flees to Istanbul to escape the wrath of her father and brother, who want her dead for having disgraced the family. Although this sounds like enough melodrama for two films, we're only halfway through the narrative.
Sibel and Cahit's dilemma is that they are desperate to break free of their repressive culture but have nowhere else to go. They live in a virtual ghetto, which they despise, and they despise themselves for being part of it. What's interesting and fairly unique about Head-On is that the onscreen conflict is not between the Turkish subculture and the dominant German culture, but takes place entirely within the subculture and, psychologically, within the characters themselves. That is not to let the Germans off the hook for their treatment of their "guest workers." Sibel and Cahit might welcome the opportunity to assimilate, but it's not an option available to them. Just about the only German we see in the film is the psychiatrist in the hospital where the lovers first meet, who offers a bromide in the form of a lyric from a song by The The: "If you can't change the world, then change your world." Sibel and Cahit eventually change, not their world, but their surroundings by returning separately to Turkey. It's a move that is forced rather than voluntary, and the film leaves ambiguous what, if any, happiness they will find there.
Head-On is exceptional for its vivid, multi-layered, and fairly unsparing depiction of Turkish culture in Germany and in the homeland. Akin gets terrific performances from both Ünel (a regular in his films) and Kekilli, a novice actor with remarkable emotional range and physical grace. But, like most films coming out of Germany today, Head-On is not formally adventurous. It falls somewhere between the expressionism of Fred Kelemen whose films deal with a similar milieu - albeit depicted from the outside rather than the inside - and the analytic rigor and brutal elegance of Fassbinder. And although it might not be obvious at first glance, Akin has borrowed a trick or two from Bresson's Pickpocket, particularly in the matter of the redemptive power of love and the narrative ellipsis necessary to its portrayal. Inevitably, Head-On, which opens in New York on January 21, will be marketed on the basis of the many awards it racked up and its depiction of the dark side of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. But it's in the quiet moments that Akin proves himself a promising filmmaker.
A much more charming depiction of immigrant culture, Daniel Burman's Lost Embrace (opening in New York January 28) perhaps not coincidentally, won the Berlin Silver Bear the same year Head-On won the Gold. Lost Embrace is set in a Buenos Aires shopping mall where customers are scarce and the old-timers wonder how long they'll be able to hold on. The shopkeepers bond and compete like members of a multicultural, multilingual extended family. The mall is home to Koreans, Italians, Peruvians, but to Ariel (Daniel Hendler), the film's governing consciousness, they are but friendly background for his determined but confused efforts to declare independence from his first generation Jewish-Argentine parents by claiming Polish citizenship and thereby having the entire EEC as his playground. Or so he imagines. Fortunately for Lost Embrace - and probably thanks to the fact that this is low-budget moviemaking at its most ingenious - Ariel never returns to the country from which his grandparents fled to escape the Holocaust. Without leaving Buenos Aires, he discovers the secret behind the rift in his parents' marriage that sent his father to Israel and left his mother alone to run the lingerie store in the mall with a little help from her son. By resolving his Oedipal struggle, he comes of age. The film's evocation of the Jewish Diaspora, the mall setting, and the yearning for absent loved ones are reminiscent of Chantal Akerman's 1986 film The Golden Eighties (aka Window Shopping). Lost Embrace is less formally audacious, but it has sweet, scruffy pleasures all its own.
