The Edge of Heaven

Three years after his remarkable Head-On, the young German-Turkish Fatih Akin has written and directed the superb The Edge of Heaven. It's a complex but realistic story, with people (not merely characters) who love and kill, often unwittingly. The focus is on a Turkish family in Germany and a German mother and daughter, all of whom find it necessary to leave separately the comfort and security of Germany for the uncertainty of life in Turkey.

A young German-Turkish professor of literature, Nejat (Baki Davrat), binds the narrative. In his mid-30s, attractive, he could be a stand-in for Mr. Akin. He quotes Goethe to his students. One quote he repeats twice records Goethe's opposition to revolution, saying it destroys as many good things as it brings. Nejat's father, a horny widower in his 70s, solicits a fortyish Turkish prostitute, Yeter (Nursel Koese), in the Bremen red-light district. He invites her to move into his apartment where, if she quits work, he will pay her what she earned in her profession. She accepts.

Nejat comes for dinner. Father gets drunk, has a heart attack and is taken to ER. While he recuperates, Nejat and Yeter become friends; she talks about the daughter in Istanbul she hasn't seen in years and who thinks her mother works in a Bremen shoe store. There is no suggestion of sex or even sexual attraction, but when father comes home, he asks Nejat if he and Yeter had gone to bed. They deny it, but father strikes Yeter, she falls, hits her head, and dies. Father is jailed, then sent back to Turkey, and exiled to an isolated but picturesque Black Sea village that ironically is one edge of Heaven.

Meanwhile, an attempted revolution, anathema to Goethe, has been organized by young people in Istanbul. The cops pursue them, and a young woman, Ayden (Nurguel Yesilsay), hides a revolver. Ayden is the daughter of Yeter, and in an attempt to resume contact with her missing mother, she flies to Bremen, crossing with the coffin carrying her mother's body back to Turkey. In Bremen, Ayden meets a young German college student, Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowaska), who takes her to her home, then to her bed. Lotte's mother, Hanna Schygulla, in a magnificently underplayed performance, resents Ayden's politics more than her sexuality. Meanwhile (yes, another meanwhile), Nejat goes to Istanbul to search for Yeter's daughter and pay for the education Yeter wanted her to have. Coincidentally, one revolutionary plank is free college education in Turkey. The police pick up Ayden, and she is put in prison. When Lotte tracks her down, Ayden tells her where to find the revolver and to retrieve it. No good deed goes unpunished, and Lotte is.

Nejat has taken over an Istanbul bookstore, where he finds enough satisfaction to look for his father. On the way, he stops at a gas station, listens to a juke box and hears that the singer died young, "He was about your age." The Turks are celebrating Eid Al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice that commemorates the saving of Isaac after God tells Abraham to sacrifice his only son. His father is out in a fishing boat, while Nejat sits on the beach waiting for him to row back to this edge of Heaven. Meanwhile, he remembers what happened when he was a child and asked his father what he'd have done if God had commanded him to sacrifice Nejat. His father said, "I'd rather make an enemy of God than harm my child."

Central to The Edge of Heaven is reconciliation: Parents and children, children and parents, lovers, friends. The means of reconciliation are as coincidental as what drives people apart. Without mentioning the word, Fatih Akin shows us how reconciliation can follow from divisiveness, and he has made a movie that celebrates it.

Back in Istanbul, Susanne has shipped her daughter Lotte's body back to Bremen, and she and Nejat meet for a farewell dinner. The setting appears to be the Pera Palace Hotel, the magnificent edifice built in 1892, when there was an Ottoman Empire and Istanbul was indeed an edge of Heaven. The two raise glasses of raki and toast, "To death." But the camera pans over the ornate food-laden tables, the gilt-encrusted salon, the happy diners. Their toast is denied by the pictured reality: To Life.

                                                            John Hochmann