THE EDGE OF HEAVEN

ELISABETH STEVENS

        This film by Fatih Akin, a German director of Turkish descent, won the prize for the best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.  Well acted by both Turkish and German players, it has a plot involving inward-circling circumstances and amazing coincidences that is distinctly non-European, despite the fact that portions of the film were shot in Hamburg and Bremen.

 

            In fact, there is a sort of “Arabian Nights” repetitiveness in this story that grows from a casual encounter between a Turkish prostitute living in Germany who has a political-activist daughter living in Istanbul, and an old Turkish retiree who has a son who has become a German professor.

It is difficult to recall–let alone recount–how these people become connected with the daughter of a German woman who, in her youth, spent time in Turkey.

 

            Essentially, as in recent novels such as “The Black Book” by Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, the subject of this film is search.  Pamuk hero searches for his wife, Akin’s players search for family members, for political justice, and for love.

 

           To viewers whose tastes have been dulled by the predictable bang-bang and to bed plots of many Hollywood films,  “The Edge of Heaven” may seem involuted or confusing.  Others, though may savor the labyrinthine patterns of this unusual film.