The Edge of Heaven
2007 (Germany / Turkey / Italy)
Director: Fatih Akin
Viewed: August 30, 2008
Format: Theatrical Print
A - With The Edge of Heaven, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin offers a mournful, penetrating exhale of affecting cinema, a Shakespearean tragedy for a modern, multi-cultural Europe. Two violent deaths haunt this film, looming calamities that Akin bluntly telegraphs with title cards. (There Will Be Blood, indeed.) Catastrophe awaits us, not to mention the poor souls that populate Akin’s Bremen and Istanbul, gritty landscapes of crumbling buildings and fragile humanity. In more ways than the survivors will comprehend, these deaths will emerge as transforming phenomena, their bright and black ripples reaching far-flung shores and lives. With six gently compelling characters and an exultant soundtrack, Akin has crafted a meditation on human connection more profound and emotionally persuasive than any recent convoluted ensemble behemoth. Despite its grim—and at times bitterly amused—sensibility, The Edge of Heaven is far from a morbid work. This is awestruck human spectacle at its most unexpected and redemptive, and one of the best films of 2008.
Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) is a Turkish widower dwelling in Germany, where he spends his days watering his tomato plants in between drinking too much, gambling too much, and visiting Yeter (Nursel Köse), a prostitute of the same Anatolian origin. Ali and his adult son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), who teaches German at the local university, have an affectionate but taciturn relationship. They enjoy each other’s company, but have little to discuss and less in common. Yeter, meanwhile, has a daughter in Turkey that she supports, a student who does not know her mother’s real profession. Perhaps wishing to hold the loneliness of his remaining years at bay, Ali offers to pay Yeter the same rate as her brothel if she will live with him as a kept whore. For pragmatic yet proud Yeter, it’s a more temping proposition than it sounds, partly due to the menacing Muslim fanatics that have been harassing her of late. Naturally, there are complications and crises, the nature of which you will need to experience for yourself.
After a time, the film departs Ali’s tale to rendezvous with Yeter’s daughter, Ayten (the gorgeous Nurgül Yesilçay). Pursued by the Turkish police for her participation in a radical communist street protest that turned violent, Ayten travels to Germany with false papers. She has a fiery temper and a longing to see her mother, which contribute to her falling out with her revolutionary comrades. She crashes on a university campus, with its cheap food and abundant spots for a homeless fugitive to sleep. When she begs linguistics student Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska) for money, the German woman offers a meal and a kind ear. Intrigued and touched by Ayten’s plight, Lotte brings her home to stay in her mother’s tidy bungalow. The mother, Susanne (Hanna Schygulla), is a quiet, conservative divorcée whose patience is sorely tested by the arrival of this brash, radical foreigner. Roughly when it becomes apparent that political idealism is not the only thing that attracts Lotte to Ayten, their sketchy ambitions begin to unravel and relationships of all kinds are put to the test.
Three sets of parents and children: two mothers, two daughters, one father, one son. Each set is afflicted with tribulations that rend them apart, some deeply personal and some agonizingly beyond their power to control. How The Edge of Heaven approaches these characters, and the places it eventually takes them, is what makes the film such a marvelously humane achievement. Each of the six principals is conventional in their way, even tiresome. Yet each brims with unexpected and obscured qualities, some deeply touching and others disturbing. Akin’s storytelling has a determined gradualism, one that eschews sudden revelatory jolts for an intensifying awareness of each character’s motives and essence. This graceful approach ensures that the plot’s abundant reversals and serendipities rarely appear dubious. Akin’s aims are denser and more sobering than facile “We Are All Connected” platitudes. In a lesser film, the threads that link the film’s German and Turkish locales would merely be the components of a gaudy cat’s-cradle, a magic trick sans purpose. Here they serve as a means to tenderly convey the echoes and contrasts in the film’s entwined storylines.
There are films where the criss-crossing paths of the characters eventually meet in a rush of revelations. This is not that sort of film. Revealingly, Akin denies the viewer the satisfaction of narrative release as well as a sense of cosmic mercy. He offers moments of tingling anticipation capped only with deflating disappointment. He also plays with cruel, agonizing turns of fate. If only Ayten hadn’t dropped her cell phone; if only Nejat had left the sign on the bulletin board; if only Lotte had turned left instead of right. If only, if only, if only… Akin warmly but firmly urges us to let go of our instinct to game the past or second-guess what is beyond our control. The thematic currents that coarse through The Edge of Heaven are multitude, but the film-maker’s essential message is unambiguous: forgiveness and compassion are the paths to liberation, whether from shame, hatred, or grief.
The actors all deliver captivating portrayals, particularly Yesilçay and Schygulla, who coax tremendous pathos from characters that are fundamentally unpleasant in some respects. Schygulla, a frequent collaborator with the late German director Werner Fassbinder, claims the film’s most stunningly memorable role. Her plump hausfrau journeys through comfort, bitterness, agony, and eventually to a kind of peace, leading us every step of the way. Equally triumphant is the film’s music, an energetic score featuring DJ Shantel’s Balkan gypsy beats and the late Turkish folk-rock singer Kâzım Koyuncu. The lush vocals and rhythms splendidly evoke the film’s aura of Old World heartache and hope. That same mood is embodied in the film’s final, iconic image. Nejat sits passively on a Black Sea beach, waiting for his father to return from a fishing trip, savoring the expectation of a reunion that rage and stubbornness have averted for too long. Human drama simply doesn’t come much better than this.
C - I’ve kept my distance from Woody Allen’s output since Mighty Aphrodite, never successfully seduced by the rare acclaimed feature (Match Point), nor by the notorious belly-flops (The Curse of the Jade Scorpion). Therefore I can’t comment from an informed place on the praise that Vicky Cristina Barcelona seems to have reaped as some kind of return to form for the venerable Manhattanite. Certainly, VCB is steeped in wistful adoration for the Spanish locale of its title, echoing the lovestruck regard Allen’s earlier films evidence for New York City. The new film is self-consciously a Spanish travelogue, stuffed to the gills with breathtaking sights, rarefied culture, and delectable food and drink. If the Condé Nast slideshow feels a touch ludicrous, it also seems a natural fit for the film’s amorous story. VCB is unabashedly sexy, in a way that few American films ever manage, and without so much as a glimpse of Scarlett Johannson’s assets, or Javier Bardem’s for that matter. Allen employs the appeal of sun-dappled locales and the arousal of gorgeous people in the throes of temptation to tug VCB towards a destination that proves oddly ambiguous. The film underlines its themes with relentless desperation in places, favors contemplative melancholy in others, and far too often clunks along on contrivance and wincing dialog. At its most successful, it’s a kind of cinematic holiday: an exotic getaway for pleasure and perspective, ephemeral in essence and bittersweet in its conclusion.
B - Equipped with a disarming candor and despairing gaze, Boy A poses a daunting question: Is it just when society prolongs a criminal’s punishment beyond his legal sentence? It gives animation to this thorny dilemma in the person of “Jack,” a parolee who committed a horrific crime as a boy, a deed barely reconcilable with his shy, eager-to-please manner. With his sheepish, adolescent grin and wounded brown eyes, Jack (Andrew Garfield) initially seems prepackaged to tug at viewer sympathies and highlight the cruel manner in which ex-convicts are shunned and harassed by free society. However, director John Crowley takes a nervy approach with Boy A, gradually revealing contradictions and unsettling currents in Jack’s personality and his past, even as he squeezes him between the dooms of public exposure and a violent death. An artistic and thematic inversion of Gus Van Sant’s more daring, heady Paranoid Park, Crowley’s feature traces a path trod by numerous socially conscious dramas about evil deeds and redemption, but it does so with a persuasive, moving tone of anguish and entropy.
Vincenzo’s final words to Adam–”It’s no longer your film”–are addressed to the audience. In the context of its own paranoid mythology, MD was not made for us. Like all Hollywood films, it was made to satisfy elitist, foreign artistic tastes (Luigi) and to fulfill obscure, Byzantine plots that hinge on fortunes and favors (Vincenzo). Vincenzo could also be speaking to Diane, who is both the writer, director, and audience for the fantasy. The strange paroxysm that seems to overwhelm Vincenzo moments before this line foreshadows the eventual disintegration of Diane’s dream. It also echoes Dan’s collapse behind the Winky’s, and “Betty’s” seizure in Club Silencio. As a dream-creature, Vincenzo, like all the characters in MD’s early sequences, is arguably a fragment of Diane. Given that Vincenzo is the unfeeling, tyrannical aspect of the Foreign Conspirator, his presence signals that Diane recognizes that she herself is an amoral manipulator, even while immersed in her delusions. Indeed, we eventually learn that she conspired to murder her former lover with the aid of a tow-headed Californian thug far removed from the Italian gangsters of her fantasy. Vincenzo is signaling to Diane in her role as fantasy architect–and to “Betty” waiting off-screen for her next scene–that she is losing control of the dream, that the bloody facts of reality are intruding. It is no coincidence that Diane herself is an interloping foreigner (Canadian) in Hollywood, one who has lost all interest in her art and initiated a sinister conspiracy.
When Adam and “Betty” (almost) cross paths on the set of The Sylvia North Story, there is a moment when Diane’s fantasy brushes past a alternate, less tragic resolution. “Betty” has been escorted from her outstanding audition to the set of a more worthy film, perhaps to be introduced to the director. From across the set, Adam sees something in “Betty” that attracts him, at least artistically, and she senses his intrigue. The moment is an echo of the anecdote that Diane relates at Adam and Camilla’s engagement party, wherein she was considered for a role in the real The Sylvia North Story. However, this is also the precise moment in the fantasy when Adam must make a decision about whether to assent to the Castiglianes’ / Roque’s / the Cowboy’s wishes and cast Camilla Rhodes in his film. He bows to the demands of shadow Hollywood, and repeats Luigi’s incantation: “This is the girl.” The choice distracts him from “Betty,” and shortly thereafter she must quickly leave the set to meet “Rita.” The pair are meeting, of course, to investigate the apartment of Diane Selwyn, wherein a terrible secret lurks.
C - For approximately its first half, Elegy at least succeeds in being an engaging portrait of a relationship, banal in its details but oddly seductive in its execution. Forget that Ben Kingsley often seems to be acting in his own movie, or that his chemistry with Penélope Cruz is middling at best. It’s hard not to thrill as the veteran works his witchcraft when he actually seems to be enjoying himself. With a creased Dennis Hopper lurking around to provide masculine wisdom, Elegy seems to arrive at a comfortable place, where skillful performers luxuriate in giving us a simple human story done well. The problem arrives when the admittedly juicy melodrama of an asshole libertine sabotaging his own happiness becomes insufficient grist for novelist Philip Roth and screenwriter Nicholas Meyer. At the point when the film started layering on the (sigh) terminal illnesses, I started to check my watch. Coixet’s unconventional editing and genuinely inspired bits of sound design don’t elevate Elegy above such movie-of-the-week turns, or alleviate the tedium of its lingering conclusion. The literate May-December romance was more heartfelt last year, when it was called Starting Out in the Evening.
B - If the mannered dullness of The Duchess of Langeais was a wincing blow to the fortunes of period erotic drama this year, The Last Mistress just might be its salvation, or at least a pleasurable redemption. Director Catherine Breillat meticulously assembles this tragedy of curdled love and molten lust with the obligatory production design opulence, but also with a clear command of the bitter-sour notes lurking within the material. Although The Last Mistress works within familiar genre conventions, it upends expectations with smoldering shocks and quiet gestures. Its most conspicuous flaw is the thin characterization that afflicts the French aristocrats populating its salons, opera boxes, and seaside castles. Thankfully, Asia Argento lends The Last Mistress the forbidden heat, wicked bite, and mysterious allure that it longs for. Breillat understands her star’s centrality, and wields her like an assassin’s dagger.