The Week in Movies, Sep. 16 - Sep. 22

Another 2005 Wisconsin Film Fest notable is making a one-day appearance this weekend: Fatih Akin's Head-On, a highlight of the Turkish Film Festival hosted by the Wisconsin Union Directorate and Madison World Music Festival. The first 110 minutes or so of Head-On are quite good, and especially if you're one of those viewers who leave movies satisfied if you've found one exceptional element -- that is, you'll love a movie solely for its picturesque cinematography, or its crackling dialogue -- then you'll prize Head-On just for its lead performances. Sibel (Sibel Kekilli, pictured) wants to lead the twentysomething bachelorette life, but the only way she'll be allowed out from under her father's roof is if she marries a fellow Turk. When she meets Cahit (Birol Ünel) in a Hamburg mental ward after each has attempted suicide, she considers the fortysomething punker the perfect sham husband, and he acquiesces if only to shut her up. If this sounds like a romantic comedy waiting to happen, well, it's not -- Head-On is every bit as shattering as its title implies -- but it's first-rate, perfectly acted and quite compelling, all the way up until its botched ending. If you want to know more, I'll pick up this topic again in a spoiler-free way at the end of the entry. Nevertheless, Head-On would be a good place to spend your moviegoing dollar this Friday if the screening weren't already free.

Also at the Turkish Film Festival, which wraps up this weekend: Kebab Connection, Parallel Trips (video) and Tales of Intransigence (video). WUD is also screening Monty Python and the Holy Grail (DVD), Meet Me in St. Louis (16mm), The Atomic Cafe (DVD) and, most notably, Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother, which has a free 35mm screening on Thursday.

Movies take months, and even years, to make, and a release date is typically chosen months before that date comes to pass. So when these pre-packaged fictions coincide with real-world events, there can be a weird synchronicity akin the sensation of someone walking over your grave ... or, in this case, chasing voluptuous young women over it. That's the sense I get from Venom, which opens today and is about a man possessed by an evil snake spirit in New Orleans. It's one of two horror movies currently in theaters that was set and shot in the city; the other is The Skeleton Key, a gothic chiller which has the unusual distinction of playing at all three area drive-ins: It's paired with Wedding Crashers at the Highway 16 Outdoor Theater in Jefferson, with Red Eye at the Sky-Vu Drive in Monroe and The 40-Year-Old Virgin at the Big Sky Drive-In in Wisconsin Dells, with The Exorcism of Emily Rose and The Cave on screen two.

UW Cinematheque presents the latest installments of its three series this weekend: Friday's Global Visions screening is Monrak Transistor, Saturday's Mikio Naruse double-bill is Wife! Be Like a Rose! and The Whole Family Works, and Sunday's Taiwanese New Wave entry is Good Morning, Taipei (16mm).

Two more one-off events of note this week: The documentary Grain of Sand is playing at the UW Humanities building on Tuesday, about Mexican teachers' nonviolent resistance to that country's failing public education system; and the Wis-Kino animation benefit blogged about yesterday. I can't be sure, but I'm guessing both will be shown on DVD.

Opening this week: Cry Wolf, which asks, "What if Urban Legend had been a horror movie?"; The Edukators, which, according to the Portland Oregonian, is "a movie that genuinely wants you to think about how idealism eventually collides with human frailty, and about what upstarts and sell-outs might teach one another;" Junebug, which has gotten strong notes for its well-acted permutation on dysfunctional families and boasts a score by Yo La Tengo; Just Like Heaven, in which Reese Witherspoon is impeded in falling in love with Mark Ruffalo because she's dead; Lord of War, about the wacky adventures of arms dealer Nicolas Cage and the third-world conflicts he helps escalate, from the writer/director of Gattaca -- it could be the next Three Kings, or the next Ishtar, but either way it has a great poster; and An Unfinished Life, a Robert Redford vs. Jennifer Lopez family drama that has spent more than two years gathering dust (more on this whenever Proof opens in Madison). The Greatest Game Ever Played sneaks at Point and Star on Saturday -- and, in case you're wondering, the greatest game ever played was apparently the 1913 US Open.

Opening at the budgets: Stealth and Supercross.

Movie times (Isthmus, Madison.com)
UW Cinematheque
Wisconsin Union Directorate
All films 35mm unless noted.

So: Head-On. Three-quarters of the way through the movie, Cahit and Sibel are forcibly separated -- Sibel describes both their circumstances as "being in jail" -- and their last scene together is as close as they have come to an open acknowledgement of their feelings, even to themselves. They've hit rock bottom and seem to find limitless comfort in the knowledge of the other's love. But at the end of the movie -- and here comes the only spoiler I'm going to present -- they don't end up together.

Lots of movie romances, including many of the greatest, feature couples that don't end up together. But from Casablanca and Roman Holiday to In the Realm of the Senses and House of Flying Daggers, the complication that guarantees separation is the same one that first drove the lovers into one another's arms -- theirs is a love that could never be. The analagous complication in Head-On is nothing more or less than Cahit and Sibel's suicidal tendencies and the implicit acknowledgement that this world isn't for them. Correlating whether they end up together to whether either really finds a place in the universe isn't reductionist; it's drama.

As such, the first 95 percent of the movie is Cahit and Sibel unwittingly getting over themselves and falling in love, and the last 5 percent of the movie sucks. Having done the hard work of selling us on the improbability that these two just might be happy together and convincing us that their suffering would bear fruit, the filmmakers throw in an 11th-hour obstacle that's unmotivated and unfair -- it really only exists to set up a Sophie's choice that can't be decided in the couple's favor. One of them makes basically the only decision guaranteed to short-circuit the possibility of their future happiness. It's not that the circumstance is unrealistic, but it's bad storytelling: Because the years leading up to and following that decision all happen offscreen while they're separated, when those story details emerge in the onscreen narrative it feels like a screenwriter's contrivance to kill the momentum and vouchsafe a glum ending. It's an act of bad faith on Akin's part, a snakebite of pessimism at the end of a movie capable of moments of great romantic optimism, and the whole enterprise turns to ash in your mouth.

In a movie where things worked out for Cahit and Sibel, you could say that even the most unlikely people can forge an emotional-cum-spiritual connection that endures the direst circumstances. But what does Head-On's actual ending say? That Cahit and Sibel are in fact too damaged to be happy? That if your instinct is to be emotionally withdrawn from others, go with that because you're likely incapable of healthy relationships? You can dismiss movies that believe in transformative love as happy horseshit, but the romantic nihilism Head-On ultimately offers is just excrement from a horse of a different color.