'Gegen Die Wand' a deep, dark gem

Paul F. Agusta, Contributor/Jakarta

Imagine a life in which the only options appear to be a lifetime of bondage or an uncertain existence as an object of contempt. This is the choice that Sibel refuses to make in Gegen Die Wand, a film by German-Turkish director Fatih Akin.

Suicidal with frustration at her lack of options, a young woman from an ultratraditional Turkish family, Sibel Guner (Sibel Kekilli, in a painfully real performance), believes she has found a solution in the depressed, alcoholic cocaine addict Cahit Tomruk, played heartbreakingly apathetic by Birol Unel, whom she encounters in a psychiatric ward after they have both botched exits from the dire straits of their lives.

"Will you marry me?" Sibel asks Cahit as he prepares to exit the doctor's waiting room after a session. The reluctant Cahil, tragically fractured from the impact of his first wife's untimely death, fends off her pleas until she slits her wrist with a broken bottle in a cafe.

Somehow, it seems to both of them that life together, but not quite completely so, might provide some sort of remedy for their pain.

After a brief but precisely correct courtship in terms of Turkish tradition, Sibel and Cahit enter into a marriage of convenience, in which Sibel finds the freedom she wants and Cahil gets someone to clean and cook for him. They are husband and wife on paper only, as Sibel leaves Cahit at home alone on their wedding night and consummates her married state with a bartender.

Gegen Die Wand starts like a hard and fast cinematic kidney punch and keeps you gasping as it rushes on into a beautiful collision of love, violence, loss and redemption. In the hands of the brilliant and gifted Fatih Akin, this film, for which he also wrote the screenplay, transcends the genre of drama with a high level dose of adrenaline and volatile sociopolitical subtexts.

With its superb acting, seamless directing, stunningly gritty visuals, appropriately frenetic editing, and a massively moving soundtrack, Gegen Die Wand is a tsunami of a film that drenches the soul with a torrent of emotions that provoke a greater understanding of the human experience, especially as it relates to imposed gender roles.

The depictions of both the female and the male characters in this film provide a vehicle for the discussion of gender issues outside of the usual polemic of injustice and double standards. Fatih Akin successfully walks the thin line between accusation and absolution in his portrayal of rigid gender roles as detrimental to both the male and female.

With this controversial and confrontational film, Fatih Akin offers up dark, gritty, emotionally evocative and hard to ignore cinema, while maintaining as objective a view possible of the two diverse cultures he is dissecting. In this context, his work feels like that of a darker, more objective, but equally militant and socio-politically charged Costa-Gavras, the director of such political films as "Z" and, most recently, "Amen".

Clearly a graduate of the MTV Generation of cinematic approaches, Fatih Akin's bold and startling visual sequences are rapid fire, and guaranteed to keep you on the edge of your seat. They are also extremely engaging, with a deep, dark, almost intoxicating beauty that at once carries the mood and the thematic content.

Gegen Die Wand, which can be directly translated as Against the Wall and which carries the official English title Head On, is not a film to be missed. Be sure to catch it at JIFFEST at the time and venue most convenient to you.

* Sunday, Dec. 5 7:30 p.m. Erasmus Huis Jl. Rasuna Said, Kuningan (also Dec. 7 at same time and venue)

* Monday, Dec. 6 9:30 p.m. Graha Bhakti Budaya

-- www.jiffest.org