Reaching for great themes, and telling a good story

The Edge of Heaven (actual title Auf der anderen Seite, "On the Other Side"), Fatih Akin’s new movie, doesn’t have a marvelous character in it like the feisty, moody Cahit, played by the feisty, moody Birol Ünel in Akin’s stunning 2004 directing/writing effort, Head-On (Gegan die Wand), a compulsively watchable cross-cultural saga that won the grand prize at the Berlin Festival. But this one has Hanna Schygulla, magnificent as the bereaved mother of a young woman who goes astray for love. And instead of two people with wildly disorganized lives, it has six people, who come in pairs, whose lives criss-cross unawares. All go back and forth between Germany and Turkey—as they must, because Akin is himself a man partly German and partly Turkish.

Akin's scenario is ingenious enough to have won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes and like Head On's, isn't short on turbulent and surprising events. It unfolds like a collection of neatly intertwined short stories. An old man in Bremen, who's Turkish (Tuncel Kurtiz), goes to a prostitute in a blonde wig (the appealing Nursel Köse). She turns out to be Turkish herself. He revisits her and persuades her to give up the oldest profession and come and live with him; he promises to pay her as much as she's been making as a "woman of easy virtue." He has a nice place with an enclosed garden where one can dine and enjoy the vines and tomato plants. And he's a good cook. But he's crude and reckless. He wins and loses at the races. He's also a drunken brawler and on his first night with the lady in his house his overindulgence brings on a heart attack. She sticks with him, but when he's back from the hospital, still smoking and drinking, he fights her and accidentally kills her. His son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), is a professor of German. We see him in a lecture citing Goethe's disapproval of revolution. We don't know it yet, but at that very moment a young Turkish woman, who's a revolutionary on the run (Nurgül Yesilçay), is sleeping in the lecture hall. The prostitute has a daughter in Turkey and after she dies, Nejat, as recompense, goes back to Istanbul to try to find her. Maybe eventually he meets her. But the markers of the screenplay are the deaths of the prostitute and of the young German woman called Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) whose mother is Hanna Schygulla.

You can organize all that happens in your mind in various ways—as a study in contrasts and parallelisms of generations; as an examination (like Head On) of conflicts between cultures and between inner moral law and external social pressures; as an ingenious depiction of that modern sense that everybody is connected, yet also doomed to isolation. Or you can just say it means people do the damnedest things. What’s certain is that even with our attention divided among more central characters this time, Akin still knows how to make us care about them. We have to because they feel complex and unpredictable and their relationships are fresh and explosive. His images are open and his movement is wonderfully fluid. One scene slides into the next with such smoothness and inevitability that it’s only later you may feel like these dovetailing moments (though how they’re filmed is nifty) are a little too pat—even as the ways relationships are constantly reshaped alternatively through luck, coincidence or unbridled emotion are curiously moving. Akin has caught something of Kielslowski and also of Haneke. And the way people shift identities may even owe something to the Antonioni of The Passenger. Like these big boys of European cinema he reaches for great themes, but he also tells a good story. There’s something for everyone here, though some in the audience may not know what to make of it all. This is the kind of movie, like Head On, you want to see more than once.

Shown as part of the series Film Comment Selects at Lincoln Center, New York, February 23, 2008, this will go into limited release in the US May 21, 2008.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.