Fatih Akin creates a twisted fantasy in the life of Sibel who becomes a wife in order to break free from her parents after a suicide attempt. Fatih Akin creates a film that shows the brutality and torment of this kind of choice. He uses Cahit's head on car crash, an attempt to kill himself after his wife's death, to connect the character to Sibel, who becomes another head-on crash as she threatens to kill herself if he doesn't marry her. Akin shows her blood spraying after cutting her wrists in a bar, a scene that is quite shocking as we feel the horror of the entire room at witnessing her doing this.
Akin also uses imagery to relate to the emotional state of his characters. One example is when Cahit is drunk and thrown out of a bar we get a close-up of one of his car headlights, cut to the red streak of a car taillight on a tunnel wall and a close up of Cahit. All of this is chopped into bursts to allow us to feel almost sick and overwhelmed, the same feeling that Cahit is experiencing.
Fatih Akin also brings the twisted fairy tale to life the morning after the wedding. We see Sibel has just left a bartender's place after sleeping with him, thus betraying her vows on her wedding night. Yet she walks in the morning with a grand smile on her face. We see a wide shot of her crossing the street in her wedding gown, and a walk of shame because her proud moment in this upside down tale.
The director makes us feel the pain and misery of the lives of these characters. And we experience the horror they go through by choosing to use marriage as a way to get what they want (Sibel to leave her family, and Cahit to sacrifice his life for another).
