DO movies have nationalities?
If the movies I mentioned seemed connected to particular nations, it is because I am talking about more movies brought by European Union to Naga last week.
Particularly, two films closed the festival in Ateneo de Naga: Helena Bergström’s A Holy Mess and Fati Akin’s Head-On.
A Holy Mess fits the season. It is set on December 24 in what is a green Christmas, meaning no snow. A woman and a man are frantic in the kitchen. They are Cissy and Oscar. Both are in the middle of preparing what seems like a feast for a large number of visitors. In the store somewhere, Thomas is getting the call from Oscar and they are talking about the need for a non-lactose cream.
In a hotel somewhere, a middle-aged couple are arguing whether the man should bring a Santa costume. The woman insists the house they are going to may have a different idea about Christmas, and this will not include Santa Claus. Housekeeping knocks on the door. Reluctant at first, the woman finally asks the “cleaning man” in. The woman also speaks in English to the man, which means that she immediately perceives the man is not British.
Somewhere, a young man with dark looks is dancing to Michael Jackson’s Christmas carol. An older woman fits the dress she intends to wear and shows it to a young man. The man is not pleased with any of the choices of the older woman.
The middle-aged couple in the hotel are then joined by the mother of the man and the daughter of the woman. A young girl, their grandchild, is with them. They are all in a hurry. The frisky grandchild run and bumps into a boy.
All of them will meet in the same house. All of them are going to the home of Oscar and Simon. And, as it will turn out, Cissy’s.
Oscar and Simon are gay and they are engaged. Both of their families know they are not getting married. But nobody knows they are up to something else, a decision that will bother the father of Oscar. It is an issue that will turn the heat on—after simmering for a long time—and make the Christmas these individuals will share into a holy mess.
The press materials for A Holy Mess asks the question about how tolerant are Swedes. Indeed, we who are outside Scandinavia look to Sweden and the other nations there as the seat of freedom and daring. But A Holy Mess seems to project how, even in societies that have made big leaps when it comes to sexualities and sexual mores, fathers still expect their sons to be “men” and mothers can still be tongue-in-cheek about having a son who is not getting married to any woman.
When Oscar and Simon finally reveal that they will be “dads,” the reactions of all the members of the two families revert to the traditional. Can there be two daddies? Can two sperms be fused so that when they swim to rendezvous with the egg, there will be two fathers involved in the creation of a baby?
Being a lawyer, the father of Oscar, raises the legal issues. There can be no two fathers!
The conflicts and concerns in A Holy Mess are multiple and varied and all messed up, one cannot narrate them. Onscreen, the taboo topic of Swedes as closet racists and repressed moderns surface and intrigue the audience no less. Monica, the mother of Oscar, explains how she is not racist but when she tells the man who does the housekeeping (who turns out to be the father of Oscar) that she expects him to clean the room in the same manner a Swedish person would do it, you could sense that othering is still present in her. To assuage this “racist” streak of his wife, Ulf, Simon’s father, gives a good tip to the cleaner who is Greek.
Indeed, it doesn’t help that Simon is Greek. And that Simon’s parents are separated and his mother has a younger boyfriend, who is also a foreigner.
Homophobia, racism, gender equality and family relationships all receive a rubbing and drubbing in A Holy Mess. The happy ending in the end has turned off many. In my book though, by the time the snow has fallen and a soft resolution has been arrived at, the world of Sweden and those who are in it have been turned upside down. A grandmother reveals her own longing for the simple world. A Greek migrant finally sees himself as longing also for his country even as he is given a sample about how one remains a foreigner in a foreign land. A young girl loses her father on Christmas and a mother is not ready to accept that her daughter can be part of the statistics of the unhappy and unmarried.
In many film concourses, there are awards for Best Ensemble. A Holy Mess can make the audience understand how this category can be experienced. Helena Bergström directs the actors as if they are fluidly moving in and out of the frame, with the camera able to catch them in their acting best.
The actors are exciting. As Simon and Oscar, respectively, Anastasios Soulis and Anton Lundqvist are dudes, the kind that will elicit silly comments like, “They are so good-looking, they can’t be gay.” Another Lundqvist graces the screen and this is Maria Lundqvist, who is the real mother of Anton. Doing a flamboyant role, Helene Bergström, the director, acts as Carina, Simon’s free-spirited mother.
Where A Holy Mess is gracious and warm, Head-On, as its title implies, bumps us and shakes our surface feelings about a woman who beds any man she takes a fancy to.
A Turkish-German coproduction, Head-On is a gritty, unflinching look at how migrants who don’t assimilate—because maybe the country they are in doesn’t allow them to be integrated—become dangerous phantasms.
The film tells of a German-Turkish man, Cahit, who is depressed after losing his wife. He drinks and drinks. One day, he drives his car onto a wall. He is taken to a hospital where he meets Sibel, a woman who attempts to commit suicide. Sibel asks Cahit to marry her so she could be free from her family. Sibel, typical of a Turkish girl, is watched over by her brother who makes sure she remains the good woman in the eyes of Turkish society.
Cahit and Sibel eventually become married. Sibel, however, remains the independent woman, seeking and having sex anywhere and everywhere. She is the hunter in this routine she develops.
Somewhere, sometime, Cahit and Sibel separate. When they meet again, Sibel has entered into another relationship and has even a daughter to keep the link firm. Cahit has finally fallen in love with Sibel and asks the latter to bring her daughter and go with him.
Even as the film has its share of nudity and sex, those are not the real objectionable scenes in the film. For the audience, what is disturbing is this woman who is like a man—looking around and determining who she is going have sex with that day. Woman as predatory, the migrant as both the prey and the predator—all these and more are the contribution of Head-On to the literature of violence and displacement.
When Head-On was screened in Naga, the First Secretary of the German Embassy Thorsten Gottfried did the introduction. He talked about how the film spoke of migrants being neither here nor there. He also talked about how the problem of assimilation produced nationals whose parents try to retain their cultures in an attempt to counter their children slowly erasing their ethnicity, or connection to that ethnicity.
Gottfried earlier talked about the theme of migration in Germany and in many parts of Europe. In a sense, that was the introduction to the film.
The literal/physical is really the metaphorical in Head-On. Sibel moving from one bed to the other, her desire for the carnal almost limitless, is no more about seediness and sex than a filmmaker’s commentary on how migrants are eternally searching for that person to affirm their identity or face. Cahit driving his car head-on hits us two ways: He is affirming his presence in a land that doesn’t see him and he is shouting about where he is, marking his territory either by his life or his death.
Birol Ünel as Cahit is a German of Turkish descent. Sibel Kekilli, who plays Sibel, won the Lola, Germany’s prestigious award.
Head-On won the Golden Bear award in the 54th Berlin International Film Festival in 2004.