Six Characters in Search of the Other
The Edge of Heaven

Yvette Bíró

In his acclaimed film Head-On (2004), Fatih Akin appeared as a passionate ‘angry young man’ with enough resilience to touch upon various styles, appropriate to the burning social-ethnic-psychological issues that concern him. He cried out with wild energy and bitter irony, even melancholy; despite the disparate approaches used, he forcefully managed to face these many dragonheads.

His new film, The Edge of Heaven (the original title Auf der anderen Seite means ‘on the other side’), evokes a totally different character: smartly constructed, complex, trying once again to play with many cards, but this time always under control. He wants to display severe cause-effect unravelling within a chaotic world in order, inevitably, to arouse emotion. However, the title of this intense and vigorous work could be a little misleading. Because we are not only carried with astute and skillful hands to a single ‘other side’ of ordinary life, but to many other sides, truly different and yet inevitably intertwined courses of life. We have to pass along almost vertiginous crossroads where people’s destinies meet, diverge, influence each other, never simply going smoothly and reasonably from one path to another. Not only do tragic disruptions define painful deviations, but also the deepest constraints of contemporary circumstance: dangerous displacements, constant migration, always on the move.

Although the story takes place in both Germany and Turkey (events evolving more and more in the latter), the sense of opposition is far from being merely socio-geographical. Violence, desire and passion – turbulence and flow – keep the Calvary of our heroes in ever-changing motion as they are pushed into fulfiling their destiny. Indeed, we have the feeling that, despite all the bewildering and inadvertent accidents, their encounters and losses are fatally determined. The six characters are compelled, each according to his or her own personal bent, to do what they do, even running ‘by chance’ to their own doom, albeit innocently. The two foretold, undeserved deaths only reveal the brutal truth of life’s fragility: blows are not dealt in the name of justice.

The elderly Turkish widower Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), with his recently ‘purchased’ Turkish prostitute Yeter  (Nursel Köse), and his gentle, successful professor son Nejat (Baki Davrat), already represent an odd triangle. Then, on the ‘other side’, back there in Istanbul, Yeter’s revolutionary daughter Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay) with her passionate German lover Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), herself followed from Hamburg by her mother Susanne (Hanna Schygulla), who once belonged to the 1960s generation – what could be more extraordinary, yet probable?

The precariousness of their lives and the constant pursuit of everyday satisfaction, the relentless need and desire to find the vanished Other, maintain a tremendous suspense throughout the whole of this tormented journey. Even if our protagonists finally never succeed in being reunited, and despite the indelible scars that have afflicted them, there is a chance of bringing about a sublime experience: a kind of openness or potential closeness, previously unknown. 

The film deliberately starts with a mundane daily event: Nejat fills up his car at a rundown gas station. We are in Turkey, and his leisurely actions do not betray any tension or inner trouble. Close to the film’s end, we see the same scene again. However, this time we stay with Nejat much longer. He is driving to the countryside in order to visit Ali. The camera halts on his back, turned toward the sea, as he patiently waits for the appearance of the once-denied, lost father. Closing with this emphatic rhyme, the film reveals the rich ambiguity of the same and the different. ‘Only graves promise redemption’, said Nietzsche. Without loss, what would be the weight of what is found?

Our six characters have already found their authors (!), as well as the places to which they basically belong. Thus their identities, those famous ‘roots’ (as some critics believe), are beyond this fierce quest. What then is the driving force behind all this restless wandering? Simply the need for warmth, for reconciliation in this rushing, soulless world, the eagerness to calm down. The earthliest wonder: meeting the Other.

Father and son, mother and daughter, are not necessarily next of kin. And even the lovers, due to their disparate walks of life, are rarely allowed triumphant harmony. And the often-mythicised power of the origin, the return to the birthplace, cannot be dominant here. There remains a permanent thirst: to set off and away, until shrinking possibilities make it impossible. Because the grievous misfortune of death is not an exile. It works unexpectedly, violently.

Akin has the rare talent to be dense and elliptical in the description of physical actions and their consequences. So much so that the unfolding stages of the story are often missing, or unusually short. After the not-so-doubtful, but never made-explicit sexual encounter of Nejat and Yeter (the dramatic transgression, the cheating remains unrevealed), only the sudden, electrically-charged morning departure of Nejat and Yeter’s increasingly angry pride hint at the events of the previous night – thus causing Ali’s furore that results in the accidental killing of Yeter.  Two short scenes, which leave no room for sentiment or guilt, describe the aftermath. The next scene shows the father being led to jail, summing up everything that ensues.

All six characters have their intriguing, strong features, and are set in a truly unusual constellation. Defined by their past, each of them is vivid and troubled. Their future is somehow written in their impulses and in the unexpected actions they are to realise, even when the incidents are basically accidents. The way in which the events develop a muscular, structuring principle is felt, holding the story on very firm ground. (‘It is my most German film, the most formal’, says Akin.) However, doesn’t this order sometimes feel a little exaggerated? Somehow artificial? Is it entirely believable that neither Ayten nor Lotte discover the identity of the deceased mother via the huge photo on the bookstore bulletin board? Isn’t it more definitely Akin’s intention to show that seamless narrative necessity may surpass likelihood? Furthermore, is it justified that two living victims of disaster (Ali and Susanne) are precisely next to each other at passport control?

The same plot question applies to the case of the two coffins. But the parallel between these two objects, appearing in the same setting, becomes an evocative metaphor. The first time, Yeter’s corpse is brought back from Germany by Turkish Airlines; later, Lotte’s casket is being sent back to her homeland by the same Turkish Airlines – these rhymes sum up in an emotionally comprehensive way how two destinies can meet in a convergent manner. The two irreversible occurrences speak effectively about their ambiguous meaning: both what is identical and what is different.

The consciously consistent structure – having two distinct, named chapters in the first and longest part of the film – suddenly, towards the ending, loses the expected follow-up. The third chapter heading, ‘On the Other Side’, seems to be rather insipid, although it became the title of the entire movie. (Could this be the reason that, in English, the title was changed, in both this part and for the film as a whole, to something loftier, The Edge of Heaven, as if this third part, a kind of arrival, could suggest a more blissful resolution?) It is not a mandatory symmetry that we demand here; rather, a less fractioned, more lucidly arranged flow. At some points there is a lack of clarity, which disturbs our full emotional identification. We do not know, for instance, to what extent Ayten learns about her responsibility for Lotte’s accidental death. We are shown only the shocking information as imparted by the police officer - but this lacks the basic detail that it was Ayten’s gun, and her hasty, ill-considered commission of Lotte to fetch it, that caused the tragic incident. There are also some not fully believable coincidences, which ultimately involve the women characters: Yeter, Susanne and Lotte all land at Nejat’s house. These elliptical fragments or smaller ‘holes’ do not lead to the denouement convincingly enough. Which, on the other hand, will be almost a romantic glow, when Susanne and Ayten embrace in a moving reunion.

Only Schygulla’s presence and performance, with its exceptional nuances, makes the series of changes and shaking transformations that her character undergoes fully engaging. Restraint and darkness conceal Susanne’s pain of mourning, leading to short lapses and rare moments of sudden outburst. Her face and smile can express numerous layers, from hard control to severe anxiety to soft youthfulness, as if she truly had returned to her former, ancient self. Her consistent physical energy gives unity and depth to this inordinate character. Impressed by this memorable range of expression, why would we need the physical materialisation of Susanne’s fantasy, in the manifest image of Lotte, her dead daughter?  

Two remarkable actors, rending homage both to Rainer Werner Fassbinder and the great Turkish director Yilmaz Güney (Kurtiz was his leading man) evoke significant aspects of Akin’s sources of inspiration. There is an unmistakable tone and ambiance so characteristic in these examples, which can be recognised here as well: the willingness to assume the rules of a great genre, melodrama, with its excessive emotional tension.

However, we know that contemporary conflicts and life conditions already require new, transformed approaches – since, in the classical sense, melodrama traces the ultimate pain and resignation of the heroes to the strictures of social, and admittedly conventional, traditions. The undercurrent is always loneliness and alienation giving rise to subversive decisions within ‘normal’, middle-class situations. The enhancement of emotional pain creates the tension precisely between the individual and his/her environment, only to finally redress the original balance. Particularly in Douglas Sirk’s method, and later in Fassbinder’s, this rule has been used with conscious artifice, an artfulness that dared to reverse the canon, in which there is obviously no smoothing-away happy ending.  In Fear Eats the Soul (1974), for instance, Fassbinder has deliberately chosen a totally ‘incongruent’ couple (the elderly cleaning lady and the handsome, younger Arab émigré), two genuine unfortunates, both yearning for love and freedom, in order to emphasise – in an unsettling way – the power of a ‘scandalous’ love. The heightening is so striking that the ludicrous flavor of it, Fassbinder’s defining irony, cannot be denied. On the contrary: it adds another dimension to the tale. His originality resides in this odd mixture: transgression but in quotation marks, with a sense of connivance; the overstep is accentuated.

Akin ‘returns’ to the classical method. All the emotions and steps are taken in a truly serious, straightforward way. Once again the social strictures, as in the canonical genre model, prevail. No irony, no cool distance can be felt in the presentation of the story. The high level of passion, the presence of merciless political violence, determine these destinies. On the other hand, the configuration of the character ensemble could not be more fortuitous: the undaunted lesbian militant girl and the middle class German ‘princess’; the Turkish prostitute and the university professor. Yet their interdependence is strong and authentic, because of the chaotic, stormy turns of contemporary global life, which unpredictably drag them alongside each other – no matter how quaint this may appear. 

Thus Akin’s narrative construction both follows and breaks the customary popular forms. The basic situations and the characters’ gestures are heated. We are never left without suspense or excitement; no stylisation is added to the interpretation. Akin dares to rely on the impact of the most secure plot device: the meeting of extreme dispositions, thereby emphasising the suffering of the characters. However, he never forgets to pay attention to minute details, thus avoiding sentimentality and cheap motivations. His actors are extremely well-handled, following the interior dynamics of their characters’ personalities.

Only in this way can the film ultimately arrive at the promise of a more-or-less serene peace. The outcome is fortunate. In this intricate and original film the director is capable of using rough, wild, unusual building blocks for a deliberately conventional, formulaic story.