chani | 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!

C'est le genre de film qui vous fait du bien même quand il vous fait du mal. Pourtant ce film n'a rien d'un mélodrame. Il s'agirait plutôt d'une tragédie, ce qui donne à ce film "turc" d'étrange résonnances grecques!lol

Les acteurs sont tous excellents et distillent la moindre émotion comme si c'était la chose la plus facile au monde. Cette émotion frappe le spectateur comme une avalanche de pavés. On souffre avec eux , et on aime avec eux, bien loin des comédies romantiques hollywoodiennes, si loin... Il y a du desespoir, de la rage, de la douleur, mais aussi de la joie de vivre et du bonheur tout au long du film. La scène où Cahit regarde Sibel cuisiner un repas turc est une des plus belles scènes que j'ai jamais vues.

Le film est à la fois violent et délicat, classique et original, sombre et lumineux. Quand Sibel et Cahit comprennent qu'ils sont tombés amoureux, évidemment il est trop tard, et le film sombre dans l'obscurité à nouveau. Si leur ultime scène se déroule enfin dans la lumière, la fin n'en est pas moins amère. Parfois l'amour ne suffit pas.

Dans cette histoire complexe les deux personnages se sauvent et se perdent tour à tour. Il y a quelque chose de profondément orphique dans ce film où la musique est si importante...