Dir.: Fatih Akin

One of the 22 films in competition in the authentic feast of cinema that was last year's Cannes Film Festival and my new favourite for this year's "Best Foreign Language Film" Academy Award, The Edge of Heaven is German-born Turkish writer/director Fatih Akin's fifth feature film, and it's also one of the most beautiful, profoundly meaningful films I've ever seen.

Akin's middle entry to a still unfinished trilogy (which started with his '04 Golden Bear winner Head-On) and undoubtably his most accomplished work to date, The Edge of Heaven follows, in a general sense, what Head-On started three years ago. Akin's interest in cultural differences - particularly between Germany and Turkey - is present in both films. The way in which those two seemingly divergent cultures clashed and how the so called 'German Turks' (he, being one of them) deal with those differences is as well.

While Head-On was set in Germany only and was an examination of the power (good or destructive) of love, The Edge of Heaven moves us back and forth from Turkey to Germany and its subject is death. The third film, Akin has revealed, will be about evil. Head-On was basically about two characters; The Edge of Heaven is about six. The way in which the lives and emotional arcs of those six people - four Turks and two Germans - criss-cross through love and tragedy.



The film is also uncomparably more effective in the way it highlights the incorporeal political and cultural lines that both connect and separate both nations. Set at a time when Turkey is on the verge of joining the European Union, Akin's film brandishes a critical look at the impossiblity of uniting Turkey, a schizophrenic country belonging to both Asia and Europe, with the union. Akin only scrapes the surface of that very political issue though, he's much more focused on the pertinent lives of these characters spirited away from their homelands, confusing themselves with labels such as "a Turkish professor of German language teaching in a German university."

The film opens and closes in Turkey, during the "Bayram", a festival or holiday regardless of national or religious differences. First seen near the Black Sea coast, Hamburg Univ. prof Nejat (Baki Davrak) is next seen arriving in nearby Bremen, where his father, spirited 70-something Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), still visits prostitutes as a cure for his loneliness. One day, Ali meets Yeter (Nursel Köse), a middle-aged prostitute, also Turkish, who agrees to move in with him to escape the censure of local Muslim fundamentalists. Yeter has a 27-year-old daughter back in Turkey, Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay), who thinks her mom works in a shoe shop. When Ali is hospitalized after a heart attack, Yeter forms a close relationship with the quiet Nejat.

However, viewers have already been warned, in the film's opening title ("Yeter's Death"), that tragedy is waiting round the corner. Yeter is accidentally killed by Ali in an argument and, as he is incarcerated in a German jail and Yeter's body shipped home, the story shifts to Istanbul, where Nejat has bought a German-language backstreets bookshop. Between times, he's searching for Ayten, to finance her education as a form of reparation.

As another audience warning ("Lotte's Death") appears on screen 40 minutes later, we finally meet Ayten, a political activist in Istanbul using the alias Gul Korkmaz who's on the run from the authorities. Fleeing to Germany, she ends up penniless in Hamburg where she befriends college student Lotte, daughter of comfy, middle-class Susanne (Hanna Schygulla) who was once a free spirit herself. Lotte and Ayten become lovers, setting in motion a complex series of criss-crossing events that changes the lives of the survivors forever as the story shifts back to Turkey.



The film has a vertical, almost procedural style, in which every scene and line of dialogue counts. Akin doesn't try to hide the plot's coincidences or Swiss watch-like precision. He celebrates them and offers them to us loud and clear. After all, life is a coincidence after another. The ultimate and utter brilliance of the Cannes-awarded screenplay doesn't come from its complexity or density (which is a lot), it comes from its honesty and care for human connections and relashionships.

Although far from the punkish, masochistic energy of Head-On, with its car-crashing and wrist-cutting, The Edge of Heaven can still have a devastating effect. The deaths, although announced, are like stabs on our chests. It's like Akin does it on purpose. He introduces us to those people (or characters), makes us care for them only to take them away through random, unexpected accidents. He doesn't, however, do this with a cruel intention. The deaths are mostly catalysts for the characters that live on, some of whom barely miss knowing each other even as they need each other to put together the pieces of their lives. Basically, the film subtly dissects the destructive and redemptory powers of death.

Akin's work is so serene, contemplative and yet so complex that it bypasses any comparisons to any current director and offers pleasing touches of Kieslowskian non-coincidences, though Akin is certainly not on the same level as the legendary Polish director. At least, not yet.

While, on the surface, The Edge of Heaven's premise may sound like the Magnolia/Babel/Crash school of "we're all connected, lets hold hands" filmmaking, Akin takes the model and turns it into pure realism. Instead of random people made tenuously and unauthentically coherent, this film misleads people intimately linked into losing relationships they need to be whole - something that happens everyday in the real world. And told with bluntness, brutality and courage, it lays bare their painful shortcomings with a power almost vanished from current cinema. Right now, at this exact moment, I don't hesitate for a second when I call The Edge of Heaven a masterpiece.

"If you want to end your life, end it. You don't have to kill yourself to do that."



Powerful, heavy, crude, turbulent, realistic, brutally honest... All those adjectives combined are not still not enough to describe Head-On. This is probably the most sincere film I've ever seen, occasionally too sincere for everyone to endure. Throughout it, with no warning whatsoever, there are these (at first) incomprehensible, random shots of a red dressed singer accompanied by a typical Turkish orchestra in front of the Bosphorus valley, with the stunning view of Istanbul in its background. It is, as well, with one of these shots that the film itself starts. With this simple Brechtian technique, Fatih Akin (as a tribute to his origins) provides us some occasional clarity and calm during the two long hours of chaos and melodrama that are hard (impossible I'd say) to run from. Without those short, occasional breaks the darkness and the suffocatingly dramatic mood of this film would probably be too much to handle.

Two Turkish immigrants (Cahit and Sibel) living in Germany - he, born in Turkey, but officially a German, she, a Turkish immigrants descendent - two of the so called "German Turks" living in Hamburg meet by chance and fall in love. Even though they have a German ID, they don't feel German, nor Turkish. Foreigners in their own country. They meet in a psychiatric hospital, after both of them tried to commit suicide. Cahit (Birol Ünel), by driving his car into a wall (Gegen die Wand = "Against the Wall") and Sibel (Sibel Kekilli), by classically slitting her wrists. At first sight they don't seem to have that much in common. He's a lonely, numb, Rock 'n Roll legend-alike 40-year-old who has no reason to live since his wife's death. Drown in alcohol, drugs and self-commiseration. Self-absorbed on his nihilism and mad at everyone and at the World. She, on the other hand, is a beautiful 20-year-old with her whole life ahead of her, who desperately wants to live, to experiment everything, but finds herself trapped by her family's traditions and restrictions.

Sibel sees in the apparently only similarity between the two of them (the Turkish background) her ticket out of the 19th century recreation she has lived in her entire life, by asking Cahit to marry her. What's interesting and ironic is the way that they both complete each other. She, tied in her suffocating culture, needs to get loose from it in order to be free. He, already 'too free', and distant from his origins (doesn't even talk Turkish correctly), needs something new, something to make him feel alive again, which he eventually finds in Sibel. The two main actors are absolutely phenomenal. Birol Ünel is one of the most charismatic actors you'll ever get the chance to see. Cool as hell. An amazing performance (won a German film prize) and a big part of the film's triumph. Sibel Kekilli is also brilliant. Not being dazzling, she has this natural beauty that fits her character like a glove. Very intense and provoking.

While being a very personal look at the lives of Turks in Germany (told through one of them), Head-On is much more than that. It's a tale of alienation, loneliness and about that feeling of not belonging (If you want a comparison think of Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things). Whether it's in Germany or any other country in the world, that's something that millions of people can relate to. Which is probably why this film has such a deeply honest and contagious strength, because it all feels natural. The people involved, Birol Ünel and Sibel Kekilli in front of the camera and Fatih Akin behind it, are telling a very personal story, far from being fiction. I can't recommend this film enough. It was here I first discovered the enormous talent that is Fatih Akin and it's the ideal film for anyone willing to open themselves to one of the most promising and gifted filmmakers working today in Europe. This film speaks, shouts directly into one's soul. A unique, unabashedly raw masterpiece!

"Punk is not dead!"