Amour fou

I watched again that German movie (bought the DVD a few weeks ago), Gegen die Wand, that is one of the best films I saw last year...It's the first German film to win a Golden Bear in Berlin in eighteen years and it couldn't be more deserved.

It is not often that you get to watch such powerful love story, and it's still intense and moving the second time you see it. It's violent, sexy and romantic at once. It's about blood and flesh and the heart that is beyond this.

The plot is quite ironic since it's about an union of convenience between a young Turkish girl and an older man, but actually it's a fake marriage arranged by the girl herself, Sibel, to escape her traditional family! She must capitulate to the conventions of their culture in order to gain some freedom from it...And the guy she picked to marry her (at the hospital where they were both sent after committing suicide) is a wreck, a punk-drunkar whose Turk isn't even good! They make a deal and get married. The parents are fooled and the just-married Sibel is free to live at last...fucking her way into life while Cahit keeps living at the edge, lost in a world of alcohol, drugs and violent sex...

Not only the movie is good (kuddo to the young director) but Birol Ünel, who plays Cahit, is one of the most charismatic actors I've ever seen (his brooding is really something)! He could give a new definition of the word "attitude", honest!

The love between Cahit and Sibel is so unlikely and yet so vivid. They are nothing but ordinary people, German-Turks in Hambourg who are kinda stuck between two cultures, but what happened to them, love that is, sounds extraordinary. It's just the opposite of Closer that got so many praises in 2004...

And the score is also a treat, traditional Turkish pop, punk...Depeche Mode, Sisters of Mercy...and even a Greek-chorus device of those orchestral interludes on the Bosphorus!

( Head-On )