De l'autre côté

So many films tell bland stories based on clichéd characters, whose ultimate destiny is established in the first tracking shot. But this intelligent film is based on a set of interesting individuals whose evolving personal histories quietly command attention. There's an elderly Turkish man, living in Germany, capable of both gentlemanly and violent behaviour; his son, successful but shy and unconnected to those around him; the prostitute he takes as a substitute for a wife; her politically radical daughter; the German student that the daughter falls for; and the student's mother, a conservative hausfrau with a less conservative past. Their lives intersect, but messily, not neatly, and director Faith Akin chooses to end his film before being forced to a near resolution. The film doesn't exactly make you sit on the edge of your seat; but it feels both true to life and utterly personal. It's a thoughtful movie in the best sense of that word.

In his film The Edge of Heaven (2007), under original title Auf der anderen Seite (On the Other Side), Fatih Akin, a German writer-director of Turkish parentage, intertwines two stories, whose protagonists get caught in seemingly hopeless situations, both resulting in individual tragedies, stories with a cross section on the character of a young Turkish German professor, Nejat Aksu (Baki Davrak) whom we first meet living in Bremen and lecturing in the German literature university classes, who returns to Turkey, on a (futile?) quest for the lost daughter of his father's suddenly deceased girlfriend, and (unexpectedly?) stays there where he, quite appropriately to his vocation and interests, buys and maintains an Istanbul bookstore with exclusively German books (or books translated in to German) on offer, two stories which gradually approximate each other, but never actually "resolve" one in to another. Still, the end is open, with the possibility for resolution, future cleansing what-so-ever, of the souls heavily burdened with guilt from the past.

Film touches real life situations, ranging from usual family tensions and quarrels, through losses suffered due to physical separation or emotional disorder, all the way to ultimate loss, death of the dear one, and in doing so engages audiences on the first-person level, because nobody is spared from at least a single such experience, or two or more. Such an easy and deep identification with on-screen happenings, with how they develop, how they are mended or not... is what we feel all along, and what we carry out of the theatre when the film is over... Split between two sides, Life and Death on the edge, but who's to tell which side is the Heaven and which one is the Hell?

Heavy matters tackled, yet easy to relate to, feel for affected characters and empathize with them, in an emotionally charged and very engaging film.

A German filmmaker with Turkish extraction, Faith Akin's fifth feature, a Cannes' BEST SCREENPLAY winner, THE EDGE OF HEAVEN is a Bremen-Istanbul bilateral drama, unfolds in a triptych structure, delineates the vagaries of destiny and incidents impinged upon three parent- offspring pairs: a Turkish professor of German literature Nejat Aksu (Davrak) and his widowed pensioner father Ali (Kurtiz) living in Bremen, the latter, meets a middle-aged Turkish prostitute Yeter (Köse), and decides to pay her to live in with him as his exclusive possession, Yeter misses her daughter Ayten (Yesilçay) in Istanbul, whom she hasn't been in contact for years and later we will learn that she is now a young anti-government firebrand, the final pair is Lotte (Ziolkowska), a German college student who falls in love with Ayten and her mother Susanne (Schygulla), who doesn't quite approve of their lesbian romance and Ayten's radical political stance.

With each of the triptych respectively named as: Yeter's death, Lotte's death, and the eponymous The Edge of Heaven, Akin presages the tragedies in the first two segments like a hanging rock, leaving audience hooked by the impending demise, it is a bold move to dispel suspense and foreground the inevitability in its fair-paced narrative which evinces of Akin's more restrained sobriety over his material and the disparities underlying the two very different countries (both segments opens with protests, one in Bremen, another in Istanbul, their different after-effects tellingly betray Akin's political inclination). But, what renders wholesome of the film's slightly fortuity-heavy story is Akin's reflective and unflinchingly humane dissection of his dramatis personae, they are all the garden-variety type, each tries their best to get hold of their lives in the best possible way, and each is undermined by their foibles, but in its praise of love (Ayten and Lotte's intense love transcends their different mother tongues), family (Yeter's death separates Nejat and Ali, whereas Lotte's death unites Susanne with Ayten), understanding (Susanne's lofty gesture to the girl who obliquely causes the death of her daughter), and forgiveness (the childhood memory prompts Nejat to look for Ali in the end), that finale really vouches for the film's title, heaven is not afar in spite of there is turmoil prevalent on the surface, humanity can prevail.

Wonderful performances from the central sextet, in the (borderline) leading part, Davrak emanates an aura of soothing kindness often outdoes what he is required by the script and Turkish name-star Yesilçay mounts a great deal of rawness and bluntness in her deglamorized commitment, whereas Köse and Ziolkovska, due to their characters' preordained fate, are the ones to proffer ample sympathy. As for the two veterans, the late Turkish triple-threat Kurtiz trades on a spot-on brazenness of senescent loneliness and obstinacy, and Schygulla, staggeringly holds court as the redeeming soul who gets over from a sad bereavement and carries on with a positive vibe, which is so powerful and contagious, that fly-on-the-wall observation of her wailing in the hotel room is tremendously devastating to watch.

After his astounding one-two punch HEAD-ON (2004) and this, in retrospect, the following decade surprisingly hasn't panned out as a substantial acclivity for this wunderkind cineaste (he was only 34 at that time) as one might have postulated, his track record after THE EDGE OF HEAVEN is a lukewarm comedy SOUL KITCHEN (2009), an atrocious misfire THE CUT (2014) and his latest GOODBYE BERLIN (2016), almost gets no traction upon its release in the international front. Will Akin find his mojo back? It will be a crying shame if a filmmaker of his credentials cannot achieve something significantly great.

This is the "Short Cut" concept once again, but in a much more clever way. It says that everybody are destined to get together. For better and for worse. We don't know it, but our movie audience understands.

This is also about the relation between Germany and Turkey and West and East at the present moment. The two are closer now than they used to be, but both parts are still hurt after each meeting. Unconditional love is hard to reach, but people try, without knowing it.

A movie about sadness but also a little about hope. Many things are too late, but some things aren't. You'll definitely sit through the final scene, for reasons which shall not be mentioned here.

I usually comment on films right after I've seen them. However, "Auf der anderen Seite" (The Edge of Heaven), touched me in a way that few films do, so a month has passed.

This story of two sets of mothers and daughters, a father and his son...and a gun seems familiar, but its resolution is anything but. To lay out the plot would be daunting. So much ground is covered, yet it unfolds effortlessly. F a t i h Akin's screenplay is elliptical--the story starts where it finishes--but by the end, when the opening scene is replayed, our journey with these characters puts us, indeed, on the edge of transcendence.

Amid the desperation on display, small details brim over the images: a son waters his father's tomato plants pausing to taste the ripened fruit, a mother pits cherries that stain her fingers, another manicures her nails to avoid a quarrel, we imagine a bookstore's--specifically a German language bookstore in Istanbul--smell and the safety it can bring to a foreigner.... These domestic details are set against much larger, although finally insignificant, struggles: the cultural divide of immigrants, students revolting against an oppressive government, how imprisonment can deaden the soul. But F a t i h Akin wants the basic struggles of family bonds to be central here. It's the resolution of family rifts--small and large, emotional and physical--that are urgent.

The choice of settings, music, lighting... all carefully selected to build toward one moment that catches us off guard. When a foreigner asks "What is Kurban Bayrami?" (a Turkish holiday) the many seemingly disparate elements that we've been watching--in good faith because they're so rivetingly told--suddenly come together, it almost knocked the breath out of me.

Whether or not we as viewers have lost a father or mother or a child, through death, physical separation or emotional turmoil, we can understand what these characters suffer. And how all that can be healed—the willingness to have faith that good intentions can mend this troubled world—is something like a miracle to find illustrated on film. The weapons these characters lay down to pursue goodness don't necessarily have the effect they intend, but as we watch lives torn apart and then healed we see what they don't. And we carry that lesson out of theater with us.