'Edge' tackles Turkish-German conflict

In just a couple of movies, 34-year-old Fatih Akin has become the most exciting of Europe's young directors, reinvigorating the melodrama with a furious kind of identity politics. Like "Head-On," his 2004 wrecking-ball romance, Akin's new "The Edge of Heaven" is perched along the fault line of the current Turkish-German situation. And the more determined he is here to examine the chasm between the two sides, the wider and deeper the movie gets.

Germany at the moment is home to about 2.7 million people of Turkish citizenship or heritage, making Turks the nation's largest and most fraught minority. Turkey, meanwhile, is exasperatingly close to European Union membership and yet at odds with itself over how European, Muslim and Middle Eastern it is and wants to be.

Tensions between the two nationalities got a workout the other night in a wild Euro 2008 semifinal between Turkey and Germany, which might have been a real headache for a young German Turk trying to choose a side. In "Edge of Heaven," the dilemma of nationality is a backdrop for familial skirmishes carried out between generations.

It may do no good to rehash the story, since some of its magnificence stems from detours down surprising alleys of plot. Akin shuffles the chronology and tells you what's coming in two of his bluntly titled chapters (the death of so-and-so). But he's both architect and construction worker - head in the sky, feet on the ground. Still, it probably helps to have a sense of the souls who inhabit a building as big and vibrant as life.

The movie and its intense performances get under way when Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), a retired Turkish widower, wanders into the sex den of a seasoned-looking Hamburg hooker named Jessy (Nursel Köse). He discovers she's Turkish, too, and, embarrassed, starts to change his mind. They talk, and soon he consents to regular trysts, one of which is captured in a comic series of shots of the knickknacks in Jessy's apartment. We hear what they're up to but don't really see it.

Soon after that he wants her under exclusive contract. He'll pay her $3,000 to be his companion. She bristles at the proposal until two strangers shame her into feeling like a bad Muslim. She takes the job, which affords her a scene or two with Ali's son Nejat (Baki Davrak), a university professor currently teaching a lesson about Goethe. He's a model of assimilation, teaching the classics, comfortable with his Turkishness, but too bourgeois to make any political waves.

The literal translation of the movie's German title is "on the other side." That's a title fit for a movie where the characters seem to travel between two countries with amazing ease. So do their caskets. That literal translation also gets at the changes in perspective these men and women undergo. The film plays out as clash between folkways and between generations. And Akin's skill as a storyteller and as a filmmaker resides in the way he makes you aware of the difference in the nature of these conflicts.

Really, though, "The Edge of Heaven" is a concentrated cosmic cousin of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red, White, and Blue trilogy. In a single two-hour film, Akin strikes the notes of emotional distress, geographical dissonance, generational discord, and nearly divine convergence that Kieslowski orchestrated over nearly six hours. "The Edge of Heaven" is obviously the more modest undertaking, but a tremendous, risky human vision is in evidence. With impeccable skill, Akin has made a film roiling with cruelty but guided by tough political optimism. No, we can't all get along, but some us of are trying. *

In German and Turkish with English subtitles. Produced by Fatih Akin, Klaus Maeck, Andreas Thiel and Jeanette Würl, written and directed by Fatih Akin, music by Shantel, distributed by Strand Releasing.