[ No. 4 ]

Head On is Loaded

by Ishmael

[Ishmael reflects on "Head On", a film which focusses on 24 hours in the life of 19-year old Ari as he struggles to escape the expectations of his traditional Greek family and confront the constraints of his hidden homosexuality.]

Long after Ana Kokkinos's film "Head On" is over, it lingers in the mind like a melancholic melody heard long ago on a summer's night. It resonates like the unforgettable mountain dirges so beloved of Greeks, and like the best rembetika it brings the sting of a bitter tear to your eyes, so powerful the memory, so truthful and universal.

Where to begin with a film that has left you bereft, shattered and numb? Best to tell you straight away that Kokkinos has based her honest and brutal, authentic even, film on Christos Tsiolkas's 1995 best-selling novel, "Loaded". She has taken what is in essence a raw outpouring of intense physical and spiritual anguish in the face of unremitting alienation and fashioned an intensely Baudelairian urban poem for this age of cinema. She will, no doubt, be accused, as was the Tsiolkas before her, of catering to base interests, of sanctioning negative stereotypes of gays and ethnic groups, but we can immediately dismiss such accusations as self-interested propaganda. In her film Kokkinos aims for truth and that is what she achieves nobly, over and above any other recent antipodean film. Perhaps the nearest equivalents we have are "Dogs In Space" and "Romper Stomper", but even these energising films lack the warmth and compassion for humanity that runs in the veins of "Head On", much as it does in Tsiolkas's important novel.

I say 'honest and brutal, authentic even', but I don't mean realistic. For the aim of film has never been to pander to crass realism, of which we suffer in overabundance. Film adds an accent on reality. At best it is honed to a fine instrument that it may transmit or heighten sensation and awareness so that the essence of life may pass through the body like the clear, burning traces of vodka in the bloodstream. What "Head On" bestows on us is a sudden, intuitive flash of insight, as in a sketch of one or two abstract lines of the great painters.

Could the film have been made as effectively by non-Greeks? I doubt it. Each an outsider in his or her own way, the remarkable team of Tsiolkas, Kokkinos and Dimitriades distils experience, memory, gesture, intonation, and verbal summation. Why? Because they have lived and thrived under the yoke of the love that stifles. They hate, love and burn with a finely wrought passion for their Greekness, so deeply rooted in the bloodsong of kefi and glendi. If, as director, Kokkinos is the backbone of the film, then surely Alex Dimitriades is the heart that beats so perfectly for Tsiolkas's soul, so searingly captured in the passionate frenzy of his youth. In Dimitriades, the angry, drug-fucked 19 year-old Ari finds a vehicle to instil himself in our memory as the Holden Caulfield of the 90s. Dimitriades burns himself into the retina in much the same way as Montgomery Clift did in "A Place In The Sun".

"Head On" suggests sudden collision, deadly impact, metal relentlessly grinding against metal, glass exploding, sending jagged splinters flying into the night. Whereas "Loaded" is a cocked gun pointing directly, accusingly, at the status quo, or your head. It's either an assassination or a suicide. In either case blood will be spilled, lives lost. When Ari declares, 'I'm an angel, I'm a whore', he presents a snapshot not just of himself but of all humanity torn between the upper and lower worlds, the schism between base instinct and adaptation to social norms. It's like standing on the opposite side of a chasm and seeing something primeval turn. Seeing the truth of "Head On", you realise what a lie Lawrence Johnston's "Life" was.

Hail Ana. Hail Christos. Hail Alex. Hail the Greeks!