An entrancing meditation on chance, fate and the capacity for human forgiveness and compassion, German/Turkish director’s Fatih Akin’s follow up to his stunning 2004 film “Head On” is equally engaging if slightly less energetic, but only because this story dictates a different presentation.
The slow building and beautiful “The Edge of Heaven” also comments on the divide between generations and cultures while centering on the intersecting lives of three families, all of a German and Turkish descent, (mothers and daughters, fathers and sons). And though while it sounds superficially to have ties to the “everybody’s connected” contrivance utilized in almost all of Iñárritu‘s films, the picture resists the urge to wrap up nicely or connect every single random/intentional dot (and to be fair, “Babel” universal link of human suffering is masterful). In fact, the mood resembles that Kieslowskian tenor of accidental fortunes and cosmic kismit.
Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) is a chauvinist, retired Turkish widower and Nerat (Baki Davrak) – is his polar opposite son – an educated intellectual professor at the university of Germany. Yeter (Nursel Köse) is a local Turkish prostitute who Ali frequently visits and is being persecuted by local Turks who are outraged by her profession and lack of Muslim codes. Her estranged daughter Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay) is a militant rebel in Turkey accused of having ties to a terrorist organization. Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), a German student befriends and soon falls in love with the irascible Ayten and Hanna Schygulla, one of the leading German New Wave actresses of the ’70s and a muse of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, plays Lotte’s domineering and controlling mother.
Told in three elliptic vignettes, their lives intercede, overlap and sometimes miss each other by a hair. But this isn’t “Crash” and the characters aren’t on some hackneyed climactic collision with one another. The film’s indirect route to revealing these connections is a little confusing and circuitous, but when it all comes together and makes sense, it exposes itself as an intricate quilt handcrafted by an intelligent and thought-provoking filmmaker to keep watching. [B+]
If you don’t quite believe us, listen to the rest of the critics. The film has a stellar 92% freshness rating at Rotten Tomatoes and the film won the Best Screenplay at Cannes 2007. And North American producers are starting to finally take note of Akin’s work as well. The director will be one of the thirteen filmmakers attached to shoot vignettes for the “Paris, Je T’aime”-like loveletter to the big apple, “New York I Love You” coming out in 2009.
Watch: “The Edge Of Heaven” trailer
