Review of The Edge of Heaven

I'm saying elsewhere that cinema is a new way of communication, and that through the diversity of possibilities for conveying a message available to it, it could even be the most effective. Of course, this is only when the cinematic language is carefully used and the discourse is coherent, plausible, and interesting enough...The film is more about its characters than about its story. Called a hyperlink movie The Edge of Heaven of Faith Akin have characters related in theme, but not in plot. The director said, “If I can’t be Fatih Akin, I’d prefer to be known as the German Martin Scorsese.” Was awarded the Golden Bear at the 2004 Berlin Film Festival, and went on to win a dozen more prizes at other festivals. With this film, he won the award for best screenplay at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.

On the other hand, there is a beautiful and easy-to-follow film. It's enjoyable. Full of contradictions? Definitely. Enough to make a Hollywood guru tear his hair out. Begins with a scene that has become Akin’s signature situation: a man in a car, going somewhere. Is the story of an immigrant pensioner who hires a fellow prostitute - full time - intertwines with her and then with her children, a university professor and an active ultra-reactionary militant, and with the destiny of another family composed of a mother and daughter, in a reasonably lyrical and not very spectacular pulp, but with many accidental intersections or tangent passages. Frames of great finesse, with double traveling shots (both axial and lateral), an editing that prevents the film from sliding into melodrama (the telenovela zone, a direction towards which the production has an evident predisposition), but also the dialogues and street scenes, manage to establish an atmosphere that quickly captivates the audience.

Sprinkled with key scenes, such as the one with the coffin leaving Germany for Turkey, followed just a few sequences later by the other coffin making the reverse route, but also the opening act of the film that Fatih Akin repeats exactly at the end, giving it a strange circularity, a condition that seems to have become obligatory for more and more screenwriters, but also an indecision of the narrative that remains suspended somewhere among, admittedly, few alternatives. The stunning but especially intelligent solutions of the plot, the performance of Hanna Schygulla (whom I can only evaluate as the muse and most important acting talent of Fassbinder), the order of the approaches, and some schematically inserted suggestions are all noteworthy. None of these, however, fully justifies my recommendation to go see this film. Interesting stories, well and rigorously told, abound in universal filmography, and almost all of them have a spectacular component lacking in this mise-en-scène, despite two murders or the four objectively and coldly displayed personal dramas.

What The Edge of Heaven production succeeds at best is in a dimension that I would classify as universality. I don't remember any film doing this so subtly, so elegantly, and so effectively. Fatih Akin's characters have whole passages of discourse in Turkish, if not the official language of the film is Turkish and not German; again, the frequent trips to either side of the (often imaginary) border between the two countries, against the backdrop of Turkey's close integration into the European Union (intensely speculated during the plot), suggest that it doesn't even exist...We thus understand much better the stumbling in post-films, which constantly spoke to us about a reality that we never felt in our daily lives; about a level of civilization in which there are no borders, traditions that separate us, lifestyles that make us so different...