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THE EDGE OF HEAVEN
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A father and a son; two mothers and two daughters. All separated, by distance, estrangement or both.
For at least a hundred years, ever since the Triple Alliance if not before, there has been an affinity between Germany and Turkey; 2.7 million Turks live in Germany, more than in any other country, and if my personal experience is any guide, more Germans vacation in Turkey than any other nationality. Writer/ director Fatih Akin is a Turk born in Germany; Nejat Aksu (Baki Davrak), the author-surrogate principal character in The Edge of Heaven, is a Turk who teaches German at a German university, in Hamburg. He is dislocated from his family, his mother long dead, his father a quarrelsome pensioner. Via Nejat we are introduced, in overlapping scenes, to the two mothers and two daughters, two of whom enter the story doomed, because framing titles, white on black, have told us they will die.
Turkey is its own culture and world, glimpsed in flashes throughout the film. A woman who works in Bremen's legal prostitution neighborhood can be casually threatened by two Turks who overhear her speaking Turkish and be so afraid she uproots her life then and there. Young intellectual terrorists hide out in Istanbul apartments, sporting red silk-screened tee-shirts, spouting idealist shibboleths, and experimenting with marijuana and lesbian dalliances. When their door is broken down and they are hustled into police vans, they repeatedly shout their names, for fear of being disappeared. As the van leaves, the neighbors applaud the police (echoing John Malkovich's mysterious The Dancer Upstairs).
The Edge of Heaven is filled with coincidences and contrivances, but as they are played andante and pianissimo, we accept them, for we have come to care about the characters.
How did you recognize me? asks the bereaved German mother.
You are the saddest person here, answers the estranged Turkish son.
It's appropriate that the movie's one recognizable star is Hanna Schygulla, long-time muse of Rainier Werner Fassbinder, whose Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (in which she did not appear) is a similarly evocative story of Turk and German, man and woman, young and old. In The Edge of Heaven, Schygulla has aged into the hausfrau Fassbinder profiled so sympathetically in Ali, but still with a fluid grace of movement, a stillness and self-possession even as she methodically pits cherries for a torte. Hers, restrained though it be, is the performance we will remember.
According to The Edge of Heaven, convicted Turkish criminals have a Right To Repent, with resulting reduction or commutation of sentence, and that is the film's message, expressed in a short conversation between the bereaved German mother and the estranged Turkish son, who explains to her the Muslim festival of Bayram, the sacrifice of Isaac/ Ismail by Abraham/ Ibrahim.
I'm so sorry, cries the distraught daughter to the mother of her dead lover.
I want to help you, gently whispers the mother through a prison telephone. That is what she wanted, and I want it too.
A storm may take any of us at any moment, says The Edge of Heaven. Comfort is where you find it; family is a bond across the decades.