Head-On: The Cinema of Fatih Akin

The riveting passionate films of Fatih Akin, the German-Turkish director of such powerful cinematic works as Head-On (2003), Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (2005), The Edge of Heaven (2007), and Soul Kitchen (2009), are so visceral and uniquely fascinating in their depiction of the gritty life and love of people torn between two cultures, that it’s as spellbinding as watching a slow motion car crash.

In fact, his break-through award winning film Head-On opens with a car crashing into a brick wall as a tormented young Turkish man, Cahit, living in Germany, tries to commit suicide. But when he meets a Turkish girl, Sibel, while recovering in a rehab clinic, who’s as desperate and depressed as he is, the collision of passionate personalities is both shocking and mesmerizing. 

This is a daring unflinching look at life through the eyes of two head-strong personalities desperately looking for love in all the wrong places. Fatih’s movies are like documentaries about good people in bad situations, who have the perseverance to, not only survive, but thrive. When I first saw Head-On I was struck by the raw and realistic performances of the characters. 

Angry and alone after losing his wife, the heart-broken Cahit has become an alcoholic wreck on a downward spiral who has given up on life. Sibel, played by the gorgeous Sibel Kekilli, who can be seen in the HBO miniseries Game of Thrones, wants Cahit to marry her in order to gain freedom from her strict traditional Muslim parents. 

This gem is both tender and abrasive as an unconventional but uncompromising love story about finding love when you least expect it in a dark ugly world of isolation and despair that doesn’t conform to any Hollywood convention.

Cahit reluctantly agrees to go along with Sibel’s plan to arrange a fake marriage for the benefit of her parents so that she can finally leave home and live like other German women and go to parties where she can meet men she likes. But their fake living arrangement soon becomes more serious as they unexpectedly develop feelings for each other.

Sometimes disturbing but never disappointing, you must experience this film to believe it. Head-On has won many awards, including the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and Best Film and the Audience award at the European Film Festival. 

On a lighter note, Soul Kitchen (2009) is a hilarious culinary comedy about a Greek restaurant owner in Germany, who wants to give his greasy spoon a makeover to draw in a more sophisticated clientele. It has all the same gritty characters and cultural clashes as his other films, but it’s so much fun to see these charming desperate, down-and-out people enjoying a light-hearted comedy. 

What I love about Fatih’s films are the beautiful, spirited Turkish heroines, and the cross-cultural music and traditions in his stories. His movies start out with characters in the most hopeless, and self-destructive situations and you cringe and wonder at what could be the cause of such despair. Then he slowly reveals the humanity, love and compassion just under the surface, waiting for the right circumstances to bloom. At that moment you gain new respect for people and life. 

Fatih Akin’s latest project is a documentary called Garbage in the Garden of Eden (2012), which is about a gorgeous, picturesque sea side village community on the Black Sea that its citizens are fighting to protect from the Turkish Government’s plans to turn it into a garbage dump. 

JP

Lee Daniels' The Butler

Inspired by the real life story of Eugene Allen, who worked at the White House as a butler for 34 years during eight presidencies, The Butler is a sweeping historical epic from an African-American perspective and a moving multi-generational account of the Civil Rights movement in the US, as seen through the eyes of White House butler Cecil Gains (Forest Whitaker) and his family. 

Raised as a slave on a cotton plantation in Macon, Georgia in 1920s, the young boy Cecil witnesses the brutal treatment of his family including the murder of his father and rape of his mother by white plantation owners.

Featuring an Oscar worthy performance by Forest Whitaker as the butler and appearances by a long list of big name actors, including Vanessa Redgrave, Jane Fonda, Allen Rickman, Robin Williams, Oprah Winfrey, Lenny Kravitz, John Cusack, Mariah Carey, Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard, it’s a fascinating historical account from a unique perspective. 

After his father’s death, young Cecil is taken off the cotton fields to work indoors as a house servant where he learns the refined ways of catering to wealthy land owners.                                                               
A  mixture of Roots (1977) and Forrest Gump (1994), the film does a wonderful job of blending family drama with the African-American experience during the long struggle for justice and equality, showing us the many attitudes and reactions to those landmark events that define the civil rights movement.

Cecil eventually escapes the plantation as a young man to avoid falling victim to his father’s fate and travels north to Washington where his quiet dignity and jovial manner around white folk lands him a job at the White House. 

Like Cecil and others from his generation, middle class black Americans embraced the American way of life while suffering under its inequalities and double standards. But his son Louis, and those of the next generation, will not tolerate what they see as the bigotry and oppression by the white ruling society, and actively fight in protest against it. 

A rift opens between father and son as Cecil’s activist son, played by David Oyelowo, who was recently seen in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Lincoln (2012), routinely lands himself in jail from a life of protesting, while steadfast and loyal Cecil must be a silent witness to decisions made in the Oval Office that will affect America and his own family as they struggle with domestic riots and unrest stemming from those policies. 

Ultimately, the most fascinating thing about this movie is the honest bitter account of one man’s journey through life as he witnesses the long hard fought rise of his people from slavery and serving the President of the nation, to finally achieving the presidency itself. 

As The Butler tries to draw parallels between the segregation of African-Americans in the US with the violent apartheid era in South Africa, taken together with such recent films as The Help (2011), Red Tails (2012), Django Unchained (2012), 42 (2013) and Fruitvale Station (2013), these films are writing new chapters in American black history. 

This is a moving tribute worth seeing for its powerful and emotional message giving a new and passionate perspective on race relations in America that has been lacking in mainstream media. 

JP

Elysium

In the year 2154 overpopulation and pollution have ravaged the earth and rendered it virtually uninhabitable, making it necessary to build an artificial earthlike environment in space.  However, only the wealthy elite can afford to live on this high tech utopian paradise orbiting the earth. The majority masses of poor must live in earth’s shantytowns as slaves to an authoritarian society while dying of diseases and injuries that could easily be cured if they had access to the highly advanced cure-all medical system on Elysium.

This visually striking dystopian sci-fi action thriller by South African director Neill Blomkamp, is a mesmerizing mix of Mad Max (1979), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), District 9 (2009) and Total Recall (2012). So far, this year has been an unusually strong year for original science fiction projects, with surprisingly smart and visually exciting products like Oblivion, World War Z, Pacific Rim and now Elysium.

When a factory worker and ex-con Max (Matt Damon), is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation during a work related accident, he has only five days left to live.  With the help of the resistance who have found ways to get people onto the city in the sky illegally, Max agrees to let himself be used as a data courier, carrying highly secret data inside his head that can potentially grant access to Elysium’s medical technology.

The potent thought-provoking premise offers many social political analogies from our current universal health care system, corporate corruption and immigration policies to Apartheid segregation in South Africa and Nazi Germany’s Jewish ghettos and concentration camps.

The orbiting biosphere is a heavily protected, gated community if you will, who’s ruthless defense minister (Jodie Foster), will do anything to keep the lowly earthbound vermin out and keep its own citizens safe from the filth below.

If you like movies with high tech military hardware and cool futuristic vehicles and weapons, you will really be amazed by the inventive gadgets in this film. Robotic security guards, floating drone seekers, personal force fields are all used to great effect here.

With nothing to lose, Max must now race against time to save himself. Using a mixture of potent drugs and an exoskeleton surgically attached to his body, he is able to keep himself functioning temporarily under the weakening effects of the radiation. If that doesn’t kill him, stealing the sensitive data in a military style ambush and getting it through the orbiting space station’s defenses while fighting off rogue operatives, surely will.

This fast paced, non-stop thrill ride can be enjoyed on many levels with its graphic welding of sleek futuristic design and a grungy hammered together industrial look, visually enhancing the clash of two contrasting worlds.  

Elysium has a distinct multi-cultural flavor as the cast is made up of excellent actors from around the world including Diego Luna from Mexico, Alice Braga and Wagner Moura from Brazil, Sharlto Copley from South Africa and Faran Tahir with Pakistani roots who was recently seen in Star Trek (2009) and Iron Man (2008). 

But for all its sci-fi tech imagery, the story is firmly grounded with engaging human characters that we can easily relate to and the menacing music gives an added dramatic punch to the suspenseful story.  

JP

The Band's Visit

An Egyptian traveling ceremonial police band, scheduled to play at an Arab cultural center in Israel, take a bus into a small sleepy desert town. While asking for directions at a rundown eatery, they discover that they are in the wrong town with a similar name and that there are no more buses leaving until the next day.

This is a sensitive, heart-warming and hilarious fish-out-of-water tale that mixes many contrasting sensibilities for much of its subtle comedy. The story is told visually using people’s facial and body expressions to give us a unique glimpse into these Arab and Israeli characters.

Dressed in their meticulous ceremonial police uniforms, the band makes a bizarre sight in this sparse sand-swept Israeli settlement. Stuck with no accommodations, the restaurant owner, Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), offers her place and that of one of her patrons, to temporarily put them up for one night until the next bus arrives.

Taking place over the course of a single night, we follow the eight band members and its rigid stern conductor, Tawfiq (Sasson Gabai), as they spend the night with the local Israeli townsfolk. The Band and the people of the town don’t speak each other’s language and must somehow communicate using broken English and awkward body gestures.

The Band’s Visit (2007) uses the language barrier to great comic effect, as director Eran Kolirin communicates volumes through a combination of facial and body gestures and strategic camera placement. It’s almost like watching a silent film where the story is told visually to show the absurd humor of the situations.

There are powerful underlying emotions in the subtle physical performances that become more important than what is being said. The actors are all the more mesmerizing to watch as they try to communicate what they cannot with dialogue, and movement becomes the main mode of expression.

Tawfiq, the strict band leader, reminds the band members to be on their best behavior as they represent their country and takes its youngest and most rebellious member under his wing to keep an eye on him. When the free-spirited, sexy Dina invites the stoic disciplined Tawfiq out to a bar for drinks, they make for an amusing contrast as she tries to loosen him up with her playful flirtations.

This is a rare gentle gem of a film that leaves one with a warm feeling of a shared human spirit between strikingly opposed cultures and personalities. By no means a political film, there’s a genuine innocence about the human story that captures how external appearances are often completely in contrast with how we feel inside. 

Meanwhile, Haled, the handsome young romantic member of the band, decides to join a couple of teenagers as they go out to a disco and ends up helping a very shy young man to win over an equally shy and awkward girl. 

There is a timeless fairy tale quality about this film as the strangely quiet town in which the band is stranded for an evening seems to be a cultureless twilight zone where both hosts and guests are curious but suspicious of each other.

This is a deeply satisfying film where nothing really happens, except that people from differing cultures are forced to spend a short intimate time together, and those who are open to it are richer for the experience.

JP