The Edge of Heaven

Based on the two films I've seen by Fatih Akin, I can say with some certainty that he is in the top tier of directors in cinema today. I saw his film Head-On some years ago and admired it, and The Edge of Heaven, his follow-up, is even better.

Both films deal with Turkish emigres in Germany, but this film is less political than Head-On, and doesn't deal with discrimination, instead with a sense of dislocation. Akin, in the supplemental materials, calls his film "humanistic." And how! The Edge of Heaven is one of the better examples of how love and forgiveness ultimately are better emotions to carry around than hate and guilt.

Akin also must be just a bit fatalistic, for he begins two of the three "chapters" of the film (which is very novelistic in tone) with titles that indicate a particular character is going to die. This lessens the shock value of two violent deaths that without the titles would come as severe turns in the story, but by giving us warning Akin allows us to prepare for their deaths, as if he wanted to ease our grief.

The story concerns six characters, and begins with an old Turkish man living in Bremen becoming enamored with a prostitute, who is also a Turk. After her death (I'm not giving anything away, we know she's going to die from the first seconds of the film) the old man's son goes to Turkey to locate her daughter, not realizing that the daughter is actually in Germany, on the run as a fugitive (she is a member of a radical political organization). The daughter meets a German student, and they begin an affair, much to the consternation of the German girl's mother (played with quiet dignity by Hanna Schygulla, one-time star of many Rainer Fassbinder films).

I'll stop there, because this movie has the rare pleasure of being unable to predict, even with the death-announcing title cards. The film is set equally in Germany and Turkey, using both of those languages (plus a little English), but is more heavily influenced by the Turkish, a natural given Akin's nationality. The son, played in a low-key fashion by Baki Davrak, teaches German literature, and then goes back to Turkey and buys a shop that sells German books, indicating how divided he is culturally. Others in cast are Tuncel Kurtiz, a big star in Turkey, as the old man, and Nurgül Yeşilçay, a sex symbol in Turkey, is the prostitute's daughter.