The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite)
January 2009 Reviewed by: Charlotte Meyer Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

Captivating, powerful, masterly, riveting, luminous. These are the kind of adjectives you’ll find in reviews of this film. It’s had at least 20 wins at various film festivals. Among them were three awards for Best Screenplay -- at the Cannes and European Film Festivals in 2007 and at the German Film Awards in 2008.

Yes, the acting is captivating and powerful, the direction is masterly, but most of all it is the riveting screenplay that gives this luminous film its depth. Three pairs of characters, the interlocking of these three pairs, and the collision of their various ages and cultures and sexualities make the story. It is both deeply personal and disturbingly political. A lonely old Turkish widower (Tunçel Kurtiz) living in Germany takes home a prostitute (Nursel Köse), also Turkish, and pays for her companionship. His son (Baki Davrak), a professor of German literature, disapproves not of her as much as of his father’s boorishness toward her. In fact the son comes to admire her for sacrificing herself in order to pay for her daughter’s education in Turkey. After she is killed, he in turn sacrifices his career to search out her daughter (Nurgül Yesilçay). But the daughter, a political radical, has fled to Germany, without proper papers, to avoid arrest. Penniless and hungry, she meets another young woman (Patrycia Ziolkowska), a university student, who falls in love with her, attracted to her passion, and who tries to hide her in the home she shares with her mother. The mother (Hanna Schygulla) disapproves of her daughter’s involvement with such a dangerous outlaw. Terrible things begin to happen to each character. The plot begins to hook upon itself and the subplots dovetail. Toward the end, the only surviving daughter is in prison, the only surviving mother is grieving, and the son is estranged from his father. After a string of coincidences, these characters find comfort, and counsel each other.

Paul Haggis’s Crash (2005) may come to mind because it too has interlocking story lines and cultural conflicts, but the characters in Edge of Heaven make leaps beyond themselves that the characters never make in Crash. Fatih Akin’s screenplay manages to bring the characters to acceptance, forgiveness, love, even wisdom. Akin dramatizes these interior changes by the way his characters act upon one another, and he brings us to believe such deep change is humanly possible.

A German with Turkish parents, Fatih Akin is at home in both Istanbul and Hamburg, where the film was shot. "The light is extraordinary in Turkey," he says, but "Germany is much less interesting." The cinematography (Rainer Klausmann) is suitably understated in both settings. The score is lovely and uplifting (Shantel). The sound mix, mostly dialogue, is also skillfully unobtrusive. This is not a film to draw attention to its technique. The acting and direction are also subtle and superb. The two women lovers are a fixating match, Lotte, the German, is blonde and self-possessed. Ayten, the Turkish one, is dark and passionate. She is played by Nurgül Yesilçay, a romantic lead in Turkish film, who had to be persuaded to play a lesbian radical. Hanna Schygulla, said to be Fassbinder’s muse, is superb as a reserved German matron.

The extras include an interesting and informative "The Making of The Edge of Heaven." There are also trailers of this and Akin’s other films. The film is in English sprinkled with some German and Turkish that are subtitled in English.

Shot in two vastly different cities and cultures, with characters to match, this film throws a bridge between them, and in a non-polemical way, invites us over. Highly recommended.

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