The Edge of Heaven

After Head-On, Fatih Akin is a filmmaker of whom I expect much, and while he doesn’t disappoint here, the plus in my recommendation is dependent on the dvd’s “Making of” extra, one of the best I’ve seen in showing how the elements of the film came together. Born in Germany of Turkish parents, Akin’s films all confront that duality, and this story too shuttles between the two countries and amongst a group of six characters who sometimes connect and sometimes don’t, in a fatalistic dance signaled by two title cards that announce the deaths of characters before we even meet them. The element of contrivance is strong, but so is the sense of human reality, and discovery as well. The story is broken up in Babel fashion, but much less forced. Schematic sure, but adventitious too, with a documentarian’s feel for local color, whether it’s a red-light district in Bremen or a village on the Black Sea coast of Turkey, a German language bookstore in Istanbul or a prison in Hamburg. Each of the actors is quite involving, though only Hanna Schygulla is a familiar face. Once upon a time Fassbinder’s muse, here she is the hausfrau mother of a young woman who gets involved with an illegal immigrant woman, a radical on the run and looking for her mother, who had long been sending money back to Turkey from Germany. That mother had fallen in with an old Turkish man, whose son teaches Goethe in a German university. These characters collide in different contexts, in a world of hurt where only forgiveness can justify hope. I was struck by the happenstance of watching back to back two foreign films of culture clash, in which characters of differing nationality have to rely on English as their medium of communication, an instance of the soft power of the American imperium. (2007, dvd, n.) *7+* (MC-85.)