Patrycia Ziolkowska and Nurgul Yesilcay play German and Turkish lovers in Fatih Akin’s ‘The Edge of Heaven.’ Photo: Strand Releasing.
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By CHRISTOPHER WALLENBERG
Friday, May 09, 2008
With films like “Amores Perros” and Oscar-nomimated “Babel,” director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga popularized a narrative device in which the action hopscotches between seemingly disparate yet interconnected stories, with characters speaking multiple languages.
But whereas Inarritu and Arriaga were musing on the universal interconnectedness of the world—how chaos in one place can affect events on the other side of the planet—the latest feature film from the German-born Turkish director Fatih Akin, “The Edge of Heaven,” weaves together a series of stories that equate the death of one thing with the birth of another and explore the uneasy tension (and sometimes synergy) between the values and politics of the East and West.
With an intense lesbian affair at the heart of its story, “The Edge of Heaven,” which won the best screenplay award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, also represents a shift in tone for Akin. While his previous feature, “Head-On,” was an intense, powerful drama about two ferocioiusly self-destructive lovers that left its audience reeling, “Edge of Heaven” is more low-key and modest in its approach.
The intricately plotted film begins with retired widower Ali Aksu (Tuncel Kurtiz) hoping to assuage his lonliness by seeking out a prostitute. When he meets the sad fellow Turkish native Yeter (Nursel Köse), he proposes that she move in with him in exchange for a monthly stipend. Harrassed by two Muslim hardliners, who warn her against prostituting herself, she agrees to Ali’s proposal.
Yeter bonds with Ali’s son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), a bookish young professor at a German university, who learns that Yeter sends most of her money home to Turkey to pay for her daughter’s university studies. But relations between she and Ali become increasingly tense, and in a fit of controlling rage, he accidentally kills her. Furious with his father, Nejat travels to Istanbul to begin an organized search for Yeter’s daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yes Ilcay). He decides to stay in Germany and ends up running a bookstore.
What Nejat isn’t aware of is that the rebellious Ayten, a radical political activist, has fled to Germany to escape Turkish authorities. The scenes with Ayten boast faint echoes of Gillo Pontecorvo’s groundbreaking political docu-drama “The Battle of Algiers.” Homeless and dining on cheap meals at a university, the fiery Ayten meets Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), a passionate German student who has just returned from traveling in India, who invites her into her home to live with her.
The two women soon begin an intense affair, much to the chagrin of Lotte’s disapproving mother Susanne (the luminescent former Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla). Susanne and Ayten clash over politics, but Lotte is clearly in the throes of passion. Before long, Ayten ends up arrested, and after months of pleading her case for political asylum, shipped back home and locked up in a Turkish prison. Despite her mother’s protests, the distraught Lotte, having found a purpose in life, travels to Turkey to try to free her girlfriend. There, the plotlines continue to converge and affect each other.
While these multi-strand, interwoven narratives may be all the rage right now, Akin’s “Edge of Heaven” doesn’t hit you over the head with its provocative ideas (unlike the relentless, overwrought “Babel” and the Oscar-winning “Crash”). The film is thoughtfully engaging and subtlely complex, and its coincidences, parallels and fateful (or missed) encounters never feel melodramatic or contrived. Rather, they merely reflect the central realities of our modern world: globalization, migration, and an increasingly acrimonious collision of cultures.
Some of the symmetries in the film are heartbreaking, as when a coffin of one of the characters arrives in Turkey, sliding down the ramp of an airplane; and later, we watch another coffin rolling up a conveyer belt into the cargo bay of a plane bound for Germany.
While “Edge of Heaven” revolves around the relationships between father and son, mother and daughter, and two women in love, it’s ultimately a film about how death and birth are intimately connected. “What shall we drink to?” says Nejat to a melancholy Susanne, who has just read her daughter’s journals and has begun to see herself in Lotte’s poignant words. “To death,” she responds, wistfully embracing the inevitable.
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