A cultural collision that’s exhilarating

“Head-On” took the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It won five Lolas, the German Oscars, including best picture, director, actor and actress. It bested heavyweights “Bad Education,” “Vera Drake” and “The Sea Inside” for the continent-wide European Film Award. Is it that good? Absolutely.

Impeccably made, uncompromising in its implacable vision of the deranging power of love, sex and controlled substances, this savage and staggering film knows how to take our breath away. It’s a French New Wave romance flying dangerously high on speed, a bleak and bittersweet love story willing to go to extreme emotional places you wouldn’t think it could reach, a cross-cultural drama by a filmmaker who has inside-out knowledge of both sides of the divide.

Writer-director Fatih Akin is a first-generation German, born of Turkish parents in Hamburg, where “Head-On” is set. He’s intimate with the virtues and excesses of both societies, and his story of German-born Turks in Hamburg and Istanbul adroitly explores the paradoxes of people ill-at-ease in both countries and cultures.

But “Head-On” is no well-meaning, earnest tale. It is a collection of combustible elements that exults in the sense that it might explode sky-high at any moment. And when it does, who knows what will happen, where the pieces will land, who might be devastated by the falling debris.

Though the 31-year-old Akin is all but unknown in this country, “Head-On” is his fifth feature (all edited by the virtuoso Andrew Bird).

It’s made at a pivotal career point, a moment when he retains the freshness and anarchic energy of youth but adds the mastery of technique and the narrative skills essential for control of incendiary material.

Akin clearly revels in being able to tell his story his way -- to counterpoint it, for instance, with static shots of a Romany band singing traditional dirges. His skill allows us to enjoy the parallel pleasures of a tale of great excess told with precise and nonjudgmental exactitude. Though he cares deeply about his people, Akin knows he has to hand them over to the pitiless forces of existence, come what may.

It’s Cahit (Birol Unel) we connect with initially, and, frankly, he does not make a great first impression. Hairy, bad tempered and unkempt, 40-year-old Cahit looks like the bum he is, someone who gets by with what he can earn collecting empty beer bottles at closing time in one of Hamburg’s raucous clubs.

Cahit’s real occupation, we see at once, is being a degenerate, someone whose goal is to drink himself into a perpetual Charles Bukowski stupor. Yet as played by Unel, an actor who apparently specializes in poetic self-destruction, Cahit has a quality that doesn’t allow us to give up on him even when he abandons himself.

Unwilling to wait for drink to slowly kill him, Cahit gets more pro-actively self-destructive and ends up in a psychiatric hospital, where an attractive young woman comes up to him, smiles engagingly and says, “Are you Turkish? Would you marry me?”

This would be Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), half Cahit’s age, but like him a professional suicide attempter. A libertine who wants to sleep with as many men as possible, she feels so trapped by her conservative, traditional Muslim family she can see only two ways out: death or a marriage of convenience to someone her parents would accept. Someone Turkish. Even Cahit, who has contemptuously turned his back on his culture, would be OK.

After Sibel gives a demonstration of how serious she is about her plans, a wedding is arranged, though not without some darkly amusing black-comic difficulties involving a bogus Uncle Seref (Guven Kirac). Yet this joining of two extreme people who barely know each other, a marriage without sex that allows Sibel to seduce the world and Cahit to retain his sometime girlfriend Maren (Catrin Striebeck), is only the opening gambit for “Head-On’s” more compelling adventures.

Writer-director Akin shot “Head-On” in sequence, which was especially helpful to actress Kekilli, who gives a bravura performance that is especially astonishing because it is her feature acting debut.

Both her character and her costar’s live through several lifetimes in this film, going from exuberant to fragile and back again, and it is a tribute to the complete conviction both actors bring to their performances that, no matter how inconceivable their actions and situations become, we are too gripped to do anything but believe right through to the end.

Akin has said that he prefers the English title to the original German, which has more the meaning of “banging your head against the wall.” And in truth, “Head-On” makes a remarkably apt fit for this exceptional film. Fierce and extreme, “Head-On” has quite simply gone for it, full speed ahead. Hitting the wall never felt this good.

*

‘Head-On’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Birol Unel...Cahit

Sibel Kekilli...Sibel

Catrin Striebeck...Maren

Guven Kirac...Seref

Meltem Kumbul...Selma

A Strand Releasing presentation of a Wuste Filmproduktion. Writer-director Fatih Akin. Producers Ralph Schwingel, Stefan Schubert. Director of photography Rainer Klausmann. Editor Andrew Bird. Costumes Katrin Aschendorf. Set design Tamo Kunz. In German and Turkish with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 58 minutes.

At the ArcLight, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 464-4226; Laemmle’s Royal, 11523 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A., [310] 477-5581; and the Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena, (626) 844-6500.