SIFF 2008: The Edge of Heaven
(Turkish title: Yasamin Kiyisinda/ German title: Auf Der Anderen
Seite)
Turkey/Germany
2007
Review by Asli Omur
Posted May
26, 2008
Director Fatih Akin
The German born and Turkish raised director Fatih Akin, best
known abroad for his work in Head-On (Duvari Karsi/Gegen Die
Wand), is a master storyteller; particularly when it comes
to the lives of lost souls immersed in longing and cultural
confusion.
The Edge of Heaven moves between time zones, cities, spaces and countries in a
quest for something that it had all along. Set largely against
Berlin and Istanbul ghettos, a lush
backdrop of the Turkish countryside and a women’s prison the
film links people and lives in one heartbeat, turning the entire
audience into voyeurs and tourists.
The Edge of Heaven opens with an elderly Turkish widower with old world
sensibility roaming the gritty back streets of
Berlin. After a tryst with a local hooker who turns out to be
Turkish, too, he later decides to “purchase” her to live with
him as a house-help and sexual partner. Her life is the root of
the drama. When asked how she has kept her profession a secret
from her adult daughter back in Turkey, she says she told her
she worked in a shoe shop. “Now and again I send my daughter
some shoes,” she says with a restrained giggle in her throat.
The audience is introduced to a host of accidental heroes, who
despite their seemingly different lives
are romantically intertwined, and whose identities and
truths only come out in the wash. The characters toast to death
instead of life with the most uplifting sentiment.
The heroes include the widower’s son who is a professor of
German at the Free University of Berlin. His education has built
a wall between him and his simple drunkard father who demands to
know who his son is “screwing” at the moment. Then there is the
communist revolutionary girl, Ayten. Ayten is on the run for
asylum. She is also coming to terms with her burgeoning
lesbianism in the arms of a naïve German student. It’s a
relationship whose subtle girlish intimacy triggers scandal,
cultural divide and desperation. And there is the classically
European mother who is convinced Ayten’s situation will only
improve after Turkey enters the European Union.
The Edge of Heaven is reminiscent of French cinema in which characters
searching for each other always pass right by one another on
screen. The reunions remain elusive. An easy familiarity and
hints of repentance, never regret, fluctuate between the
characters.
The
Edge of Heaven is almost heaven, almost hell with fleeting glimmers of hope
and revelation. The delayed emotion and cautious dialogues
between the characters lend to several tension building
explosive finales that the audience could have never prepared
for.
As it has been Fatih Akin's approach
in the past, The Edge of Heaven
sparkles and crackles
with death, dislocation and
humor amidst chaos.
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2006 All content property of European Weekly unless where otherwise
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