Film Description
| THE EDGE OF HEAVEN | ||
| Director: | Fatih Akin |  |
| Country: | Germany/Turkey | |
| Year: | 2007 | |
| Language: | German, Turkish, English | |
| Time: | 122 minutes | |
| Rating: | 14A | |
| Principal Cast: | Nurgül Yeşilçay, Baki Davrak, Patrycia Ziolkowska, Nursel Köse, Tuncel Kurtiz | |
| Trailer: | View the trailer for this film | |
| SCREENING TIMES | |||
| Thursday, September 18 | 7:00 PM | Art Gallery of Windsor | Tickets: $10.00 |
Fatih Akin's new feature marks a major step in his career. Best known for Head-On, this Turkish-German filmmaker has, in a short period, risen to become one of the most significant voices of contemporary German cinema. While it may be a stretch to refer to him as heir apparent to Fassbinder, there is something in his realist style and readiness to engage in social and political issues that reminds one of the great master.
The Edge of Heaven moves us back and forth from Turkey to Germany to tell a complex story of intersecting lives, where the hopes and dreams of the characters become intertwined in a search for love and parents. The key protagonists are two men and two women - father and son, mother and daughter - who separately comprise two incomplete families. Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) is a spirited septuagenarian given to visiting hookers to keep his loneliness at bay. Nejat (Baki Davrak), his son, is a young professor. Ali takes a shine to Yeter (Nursel Köse), a middle-aged prostitute, also Turkish, who agrees to move in with him to escape the censure of local Muslim fundamentalists. It transpires that Yeter has a twentysomething daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yeşilçay), who is still in Turkey.
Akin details these lives quickly and efficiently, before upping the pace and the ante. Events take the bookish Nejat to Istanbul in search of Yeter's daughter while Ayten, ironically, finds herself in Germany looking for her mother. As is so often the case, life takes on its own momentum; the attractive Ayten soon falls in love with a young German woman who lives with her judgmental mother.
Though this sounds complicated, Akin wends his way through his plot, far less interested in narrative per se than in the relationships it generates. Melodrama is never far from the surface (as was often the case in Fassbinder's work) and plot surprises abound, but the film offers a very subtle and emotionally engaging depiction of intertwining lives. Paternal, maternal, heterosexual and lesbian love are juxtaposed with questions of family and homeland. Rich, dense, finely sketched relationships between characters are the defining features of this poignant and at times devastating film.
Piers Handling
© 2007 Toronto International Film Festival Group.
