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THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
Written & Directed by Fatih Akin
Produced by Andreas Thiel, Klaus Maeck & Akin
Director of Photography, Rainer Klausmann
Edited by Andrew Bird
Music by Shantel
Released by Strand Releasing
In German, Turkish & English with English subtitles
Germany/Turkey. 122 min. Not Rated
With Baki Davrak, Nursel Kose, Hanna Schygulla, Tuncel Kurtiz, Nurgul Yesilcay & Partycia Ziolkowska

All eyes are on Fatih Akin as he tries to recapture the whirlwind success of Head-On, his brilliant last feature. With auteur status hanging in the balance, the pressure to surpass his grungy masterpiece is evident in the sweeping ambition of The Edge of Heaven, which deals with many more issues and on a far greater scale.

In Bremen, Germany, elderly Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) pays Yeter (Nursel Kose), a middle-age Turkish prostitute, to leave her window in the red-light district and come live with him. At first taken aback by the arrangement, Nejat (Baki Davrak), Ali’s visiting son and a professor of German, is touched to hear that his father’s paid companion is trying to put her only daughter through school, an example of Akin’s zealous though somewhat simplistically presented reverence for education.

After Yeter’s sudden and senseless death, which we’re warned of far in advance by a chapter heading, Nejat journeys to Turkey, having pledged to find and support her daughter, Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay), a Kurdish political activist on the run from the Turkish police. Ironically, Ayten escapes to Germany, where she befriends and seduces Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska, in the film’s most rattling and heartfelt performance), a fearless German hippie who gets caught up in her lover’s legal troubles and, also foreshadowed with ample warning, randomly meets her demise.

The crisscrossing storylines and jumbled time line serve as a canvas for myriad relationships – death and birth, parent and child, and most importantly, the relationship between Turkey and Germany. Akin is a German director of Turkish decent whose love-hate relationship with his country of origin leaned somewhat to the latter side in Head-On. In The Edge of Heaven, the second film of what he hopes to be a trilogy, a kinder outlook emerges. As inertia draws Nejat out of Germany and back to Turkey, Akin seems to be atoning for his own western integration.

A film about so much is bound to feel diluted. Though it does fall short of Head-On’s unbroken energy, the undulations in these characters’ lives are portrayed with the care and lyricism of an eastern poem. For all its dense plotlines (with irony, coincidence, and chance all weighing in), the film is a beautiful survey of love as even the most tragic events push its inhabitants toward kindness and reconciliation. Yana Litovsky
May 22, 2008