Head On & Slacker

These are only lumped together because I watched them around the same time, but interestingly they share an importance: they are both interesting from the point of view of tracing a director's development.

Head-On I went out and bought the day after I saw The Edge of Heaven. The themes of displacement and the uneasy relationship between Germany and Turkey, and the conflicted identities of those born in one but raised in another are present in Head-On as much as they are in The Edge of Heaven, but there's a certain fear perhaps of going too far with them. Maybe not, maybe I'm looking for differences when actually there aren't any. Having said that, I enjoyed The Edge of Heaven more, perhaps for apparently superficial reasons like there being a character who was a lecturer in it or perhaps for deeper, more-difficult-to-enunciate reasons. I think I felt that The Edge of Heaven was more assured, less afraid to tackle big themes. Someone in the Guardian called it daring, whereas Head-On was more tentative.

Slacker I didn't like very much. It looked far too much like an exercise, an experiment, than an actual film. Nevertheless, I'd never considered it in the view of Before Sunrise and Sunset, films I love and which share a similar walking-and-talking aesthetic. But whereas those films are full of the warmth of well-drawn characters, Slacker is empty, almost vacuous. Perhaps it was intended - as a reflection of the characters? - but it doesn't hold up: once you've seen one switch of characters, you've seen them all. You never get to know any of the human beings in the film and in fact the greatest character is the city itself, despite the fact you're never actually told what city it is. Writing that I'm reminded of Gus Van Sant's Elephant, but whereas that film managed to create an entire world simply by wandering its physical parameters, Slacker seems naive, not thought through, as if Richard Linklater had this concept and padded it out.