Coming on like an onslaught of Galatasaray fans after you’ve pissed on their flag, Head On’s punkish tale of star-crossed romance in the Turkish-German community has already swept up at the European Film Awards, where it rightly took prizes for Best Director and Film.
This extravagantly sanguinary two fingered salute kicks off with newcomer Kekilli’s wayward happy slapper propositioning Unel’s rugged, fucked-up forty year old punk. She wants a sham marriage to escape her Muslim family. He thinks she’s crazy (growling ‘I only fuck men’ by way of considered response) but is reluctantly won over when she smashes a bottle and slashes her wrists, a seduction technique which features heavily throughout their relationship.
Shortly after their Big Fat Turkish Wedding, for one glimmering moment, it feels like we’ve wandered into a mesmerising, edgy reworking of Green Card. As he watches her gleefully trawl the clubs for the kind of gentlemen who don’t ask questions and are gone in the morning, he slowly starts to warm toward her infectious sense of abandon. She fixes up his cesspool of an apartment and bedraggled aspect, feeds him Biber Dolmasi, and happily leaves his tattered fading poster of Siouxsie right where it is. Though he’s possibly the last man in Hamburg to receive the honour, they eventually start fucking and falling for one another.
Then things go horribly wrong for our untamed hearts and the entire feverishly fervid proceedings are transferred from the shabby bohemian streets of St. Pauli’s red light district to the rather more stringent setting of Istanbul. There, almost inevitably, things get even worse for our bloodletting passionate pair.
All the while, a Turkish gypsy band act as Greek Chorus by the banks of the Bosphorus, but if Akin’s film is peppered with such fascinating exotic excursions and mediations on immigrant identity, this gripping hardcore fable is as far from cultural tourism as could possibly be imagined. Rather it’s a big, bad whirlwind of a movie with remarkably complex protagonists and appropriately storming performances which simultaneously provides Turkish delights and great big ‘Welcome To Hell’ placards. An absolute shot in the arm for European cinema.

121mins. Cert IFI members. Opens February 18th