• newsletters • best of austin • find a paper • submit an event • advertise with us • contact • jobs •
Calendar: Film Listings

The Edge of Heaven

Year Released: 2007
Directed By: Fatih Akin
Starring: Nurgül Yesilçay, Baki Davrak, Tuncel Kurtiz, Hanna Schygulla, Patrycia Ziolkowska, Nursel Köse
(NR, 122 min.)

In the opening scene of Crash, Paul Haggis’ 2004 Academy Award-winning sermon on race relations, Don Cheadle’s character, Graham Waters, says: “In L.A. nobody touches you. … I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.” When it was released, Crash was the leading light in a new school of filmmaking, a school that followed the dour adventures of dour, seemingly disparate characters as their lives dovetailed with and eventually smashed headlong into the lives of others, usually equally dour. Along with other practitioners of this form – in particular Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Babel and 21 Grams – Haggis believed that the inarguable interconnectedness of humanity could be best illustrated cinematically by being as loud and fervent as possible, subtlety be damned. Now comes the inevitable, and welcome, calming of the form. In Akin’s The Edge of Heaven, people don’t explode into one another’s lives in fits of racial animosity or random violence; instead, they brush by one another in the street and look past one another as their trains pass, unknowing, illustrating the far more convincing and far more sophisticated argument that, yes, we’re all connected, but most of the time, most of us have no idea. The film, split into three chapters, is a transgenerational, transborder microcosm of modern cultural melding. First there’s Ali (Kurtiz), an old Turkish pensioner living in Germany, whose violent encounter with a prostitute (Köse) forces his son, Nejat (Davrak), a college professor, to forgo his life in Hamburg and go to Turkey in search of the woman’s daughter, Ayten (Yesilçay). Little does Nejat know, however, that Ayten, an anti-government radical, has fled to Germany to escape persecution, where she meets and falls in love with a young student (Ziolkowska) whose mother (Schygulla) wears her disapproval like a protective cloak. So, here you’ve got six lives, all connected and all reflecting some part of the modern cross-cultural experience, both in Old Europe and the soon-to-be-New Europe. It’s an issue Akin explored brilliantly in his 2004 film Head-On, in which confusion over cultural identity didn’t just define lives; it burned them up from the inside out. But in The Edge of Heaven, a more tempered Akin seems content to allow the incidental lives of incidental people merging incidentally to pass quietly and at their own paces. Which indicates a much-needed maturation of the Babel/Crash formula but also fails to rattle your bones the way those movies did. Pick your poison, I suppose.

  Josh Rosenblatt [2008-09-19]

Share Digg Twitter Facebook Del.icio.us LinkedLn Email Print article


POST A COMMENT

(optional):
:

Permission to Print. Letter to the editor.




SHOWTIMES
BY THEATER

BY FILM

NEW REVIEWS

Antichrist
Lars von Trier lives to affront again. Chaos, indeed, reigns. - Marc Savlov


The Blind Side
John Lee Hancock, director of The Rookie, scores with another sports drama, this time concerning a true football story. - Kimberley Jones


Fantastic Mr. Fox
Opens Wednesday. - Marjorie Baumgarten

The Messenger
Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster play two members of the military's casualty notification team, which delivers bad news to soldiers' next of kin. - Marjorie Baumgarten


Ninja Assassin
Opens Wednesday. - Marjorie Baumgarten

Old Dogs
Opens Wednesday. - Marjorie Baumgarten

Planet 51
In a switcheroo, animated aliens fear the human in their midst. - Marc Savlov


Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
Much like the title character Precious, this rough-hewn movie overcomes the unlikely odds for its success. - Marjorie Baumgarten


The Road
Opens Wednesday. - Marjorie Baumgarten

The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Edward and Bella are back for more thwarted young vampiric love. - Marjorie Baumgarten

Until the Light Takes Us
This music documentary chronicles the history, ideology, and aesthetic of Norwegian black metal. - Raoul Hernandez


SPECIAL SCREENINGS

OFFSCREEN LISTINGS

FILM ARCHIVE
Search title, directors, and cast.

Browse 11744 archived film reviews by:

REVIEWER

TITLE
A B C D E F G
H I J K L M N
O P Q R S T U
V W X Y Z

RATING

MPAA

Short Story Contest
Online Contests
Chrontourage
Chronicle Merch

 
Arts & Entertainment (108)
Services (108)
Civic (20)
Retail (48)
Food & Drink (67)
Coupons (8)
Jobs (9)

Ads of the Day