Though bleak, The Edge of Heaven provides a compelling portrait of familial and race relations
Somewhere in the back of your average filmgoer’s mind, behind all their knowledge and best intentions, lies his or her archetype of a “foreign” film. Dust off this imaginary video and you’ll find a glacial pace, a tone that’s earnest in the extreme and, of course, ineffable “foreignness,” like there’s always some essential subtext just beyond your reach.
Winner of the 2007 Cannes Prix du scénario (Best Screenplay Award), The Edge of Heaven might very well be that film. With unhurried individual scenes sometimes jumping entire years between cuts, and a complex portrait of familial and race relations, it is unabashedly complex and severe. However, ineffable it isn’t. Though its style is distinctly cast, the result is still intriguingly complex, if sometimes impossibly bleak.
Based largely on the difficult relationship between Germany and Turkey (the latter providing the former’s highest percentage of immigrants), The Edge of Heaven deals in death, drama and sadness. Writer-director Fatih Akin, himself a German of Turkish descent, creates an interlocking triptych of narratives centred on three pairs of children and parents — an estranged Turkish mother and daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay) and Yeter Öztürk (Nursel Köse); a Turkish-German son and father, Nejat (Baki Davrak) and Ali Aksu (Tuncel Kurtiz); and a German mother and daughter, Susanne (Hanna Schygulla ) and Lotte Staub (Patrycia Ziolkowska).
Overlapping in ways that are sometimes significant, sometimes mundane, the stories provide a rich world whose complexity often overshadows the limited depth given to each character. Akin employs a bizarrely paradoxical approach, pacing his scenes with extreme care, then leaping forward with little indication of time, such as when Nejat is arrested, processed and deported over the course of a year, all within less than 10 minutes.
It makes for a distinct esthetic that provides the audience with distance before crashing it headlong back into tragedy, mirroring the national disenfranchisement each character experiences differently.
In fact, when Nejat recognizes Susanne as “the saddest person here,” he may be making the boldest statement of the film. From deaths in the family to unforgivable transgressions and a frustrated love affair, Heaven’s stories are the stuff of tragedy, and in Akin’s border between Germany and Turkey, the greatest joy his characters can find is bittersweet.
In this bittersweet taste, heavy though it may be on the bitter, The Edge of Heaven offers a welcome addition to the local palette. It’s bracing, certainly, and clips taken out of its larger context might be prime fodder for parodying the archetypal “foreign” film, but in Akin’s no man’s land of race and family, context is everything.
