The two accidental lovers in Head On would make a wonderful couple, if only they could stop trying to kill themselves. They care for each other almost as much as they hate themselves, and every iota of happiness they manage to grasp is lost shortly thereafter in a succession of drugs, booze and violence and unhappy sex.

Their self-destructive relationship serves as a metaphor of sorts for another sort of relationship: one between cultures, and cultural identities. Writer-director Fatih Akin is of Turkish descent, now living in Hamburg, and his characters are of the same ethnic-geographic origin. In them he represents aspirations towards a culture which refuses assimilation, and a hatred of an identity, as strong as the identity itself is irrepressible. The film seems to be an indictment of both Germans and Turks - although not an overt one, since the cultural element is indeed a subtext, and the characters' problems are very much their own; hose characters and their problems are, at least superficially, what Head On is mostly about.

The characters are Cahit (Birol Ünel) and Sibel (Sibel Gü), two Turkish immigrants who find themselves in a marriage of convenience, after meeting in a hospital while recovering from respective suicide attempts. Cahit is a forty-something alchoholic who mourns his dead wife by filling his mind and body with substances and instigating barfights, which he usually ends up losing; Sibel is a twenty two year old from a strictly traditional family, from whom she attempts (and fails) to achieve independence by slitting her wrists. When she meets Cahit, she immediately suggests they marry; becase he's Turkish, her parents will accept their union, thus giving her a ticket out of their household; in return, she offers to share Cahit's rent and cook and clean for him, at least until they inevitably divorce. She makes it clear they will not sleep together.

He refuses her offer, and she promptly slits her wrists again; moved by some degree of sympathy, he eventually warms to the idea. He meets her parents, her brother, they are married, they move in together. She immediately begins to do as many drugs, sleep with as many partners, be as wild and rambunctio as she can. Sometimes, her hellbent enthusiasm rubs off on Cahit, and he joins her in the dance clubs, where they both drown in alcohol; and then, after some months, they suddenly, promptly realize they love each other. All of this occurs within the first act of the film; in the second, Cahit and Sibel are separated, and Akin moves into even darker narrative territory. I was reminded consistently throughout Head On of a film written by John Cassavetes and directed by his son Nick called She's So Lovely, starring Robin-Wright Penn and Sean Penn as two alcoholic lovers separated by their own trangressions; narratively speaking, both films have, nearly beat for beat, the same plot, and the same love for their luckless characters; both succeed in turning two losers into sympathetic human beings.

Ünel and Gü both give wonderful performances, and their intense chemistry seems a thing all their own, rather than a development implied by script. Indeed, I believe the strengths of the film are more theirs than Akin's, who's direction is loose and free-wheeling, with indeterminate style. In the best scenes, like the best parts of a Bukowski novel, his whirling camera achieves a sort of giddy, intoxicated desperation, high on equal parts love and pain; in the worst, his approach feels somewhat amateurish, with scenes that go on too long or not long enough, shot with an awkward visual style short on acumen. He also relies too frequently on music when silence would have been perfectly appropriate; sensory overload is only appropriate in some parts of this film.

What one remembers, though, are the moments where the passion of the two leads quicken the film's pulse; when Cahit professes his love in a tortured scream while slamming his hands down on broken glass; when Sibel downs a bottle of whiskey on the dance floor; when they embrace each other, spattered in each other's blood and intoxicated by their desire. One remembers these moments, and also their subtext, which is why I think the film won the Golden Bear at last year's Berlin Film Festival. The cultural rift that brings the characters together while simultaneously fueling their misery must have struck a chord with European viewers, who live on the continent that is the world's largest melting pot.

The film begins with, and is periodically interrputed by, the explicitly staged image of a band playing traditional Turkish folk tunes on the banks of a river in Instanbul. This old-world memento serves to highlight the love-hate feeling the characters, and Akin himself, seem to feel towards their heritage. I mentioned that Akin seems to be indicting both German and Turkish culture with the film; to be more specific, I think he is indicting both culture's stifling close-mindedness - a position signified by one key moment near the very end of the film, when Cahit explains his feelings and intentions, not in German, not in Turkish, but in clear, calm English.