Sibel is admitted to a psychiatric ward after trying to kill herself. She has no feeling of freedom or direction in life and her family cloys on her. So she arranges to marry another Turkish in-patient, Cahit, who drove his car into a wall. Dolled-up and put in a suit, he makes a passable son-in-law, and Sibel tries to live a free life away from the eyes of her father and brother. The film tracks the mutual collision of Sibel and Cahit.
Every scene, every line in this film is a cliché - or rather, it flowers out of cliché. It's directed in a hard-driving MTV style, (although the music kind of predates that - a Birthday Party track from Prayers on Fire, for example - ) and so the whole film should have this sheen of fake. Except it doesn't. Gegen die Wand speaks the truth - bitterly, fiercely, exultantly. It so refuses to lie that the ending is disappointing and unsettling; our lust for tragedy is neither sated nor archly refused. In a highly mediated environment, in a media hall of mirrors, we don't become any less human, our skin doesn't turn into plastic. Most films take refuge in a fantasy of vacuum-sealed, affectless horror. Head On doesn't kick through the glass screen exactly, but it's a warm-blooded creature, scampering about under the floorboards and fighting to survive.
Picture of Sibel Kekilli
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