Head On (1998)

Ana (born Anastasia) Kokkinos was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1958 to Greek parents who had emigrated there. She was approaching 40 when she made Head On: it was her second movie.

If you're curious as to why she didn't start movies earlier in her life, it was due to the fact that originally she graduated from law School and worked as a lawyer for 9 years, before applying to and being accepted in film school in 1991. Head On, an adaptation of a novel by gay Greek-Australian author Christos Tsiolkas is her best film so far.

The film has had a distinguished career: winning the Grand Jury Award for Outstanding Foreign Narrative Feature in the L.A. Outfest, Best First Feature in the San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, Best Film in the Milan International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, Award of Distinction from the Australian Cinematographers Society, Best Screenplay Adaptation from the Australian Writers' Guild and Best Editing from the Australian Film Institute (which also gave the movie 8 more nominations, including Best Film, Director, Screenplay, Lead Actor and Supporting Actor).

I was meaning to write my own review, but while reading on the film, I've found this excellent review/synopsis in imdb written by Chaz Devlin from L.A.. Since I agree with everything that he has to say and I can't think of a way to say it better, here it is:

Head On is a stunning film by Ana Kokkinos. It chronicles twenty-four hours in the life of nineteen year old Ari that begins at a wedding reception. This event contextualizes the protagonist's tortured sexual persona squarely within the activity with which the rigid, patriarchal, Greek culture expects him to play out his own life.

Ex-patriot communities tend to be even more conservative than the populations they've left behind. In the multi-ethnic milieu of Melbourne, Australia, everyone hates everyone else and many find themselves with the dilemma of assimilating into the more progressive, liberal Anglo culture they grow up in schizophrenically. Add to this already volatile mixture the element of drugs, which can make anything seem possible, and you have a tortured soul who has to keep from having to make the choice of being a good Greek Australian boy, the son his parents want him to be, or amputating himself from his ethnic group and family so that he can fully embrace his unpopular desire.

Ari barely manages this precarious balancing act by trying to find meaningful relationships among his vast Greek extended family, where he only runs into homophobia and is warned, in no uncertain terms, against making the choice he seems headed for. To this end he respects and spends time with his cousin Johnny, who occasionally gets stoned, dresses like a woman and throws himself into the night spots frequented by his scornful and contemptuous Greek peers. And it is through fraternizing with Johnny that Ari endures his most humiliating experience in a brutal strip search at a police station where an Anglo cop goads his fellow Greek Australian cop to even greater heights of cruelty by provoking his ethnic revulsion.

Ari agonizingly poises himself between the two worlds by throwing himself into anonymous, impulsive, public sexual encounters in which he attempts, with some success, to assert his masculinity by assuming a strictly dominant role. It is in the frenetic, sexual, drug-induced moments, as Ari makes his progress through this personal inferno, that Kokkinos' film transcends its subject. Using heaving, swooning rushes of the subjective camera, placing us precisely within Ari's delirious and tormented point of view, Kokkinos elevates this film into a kind of ecstatic cinema. When Ari manages to alienate the only person who offers him love instead of just sex, he finds himself thrown out onto a pier in the early dawn hours, dancing the Hasapiko and proclaiming himself a "whore, a sailor" and recognizing that in this state of limbo that his "life doesn't matter to anyone."

It is to Kokkinos' credit as a filmmaker and to the extraordinary performances of Alex Dimitriades as Ari and Paul Capsis as Johnny that we are seduced into caring about these ailing characters. The omniscient and critical eye of the film never fails to point out the contradictions in the ideologies that drive these colliding social forces and it is because of the remarkable empathy these people are viewed with that we are coaxed to immerse ourselves into this dark and masochistic vision. After all, we're all only one or two steps away from being trapped in the same kind of predicament ourselves.

Grade: 9/10

Here's the trailer: