Fatih Akin’s most recent film Auf der Anderen Seite, playing here as The Edge of Heaven, opens with a shot of a tin shed baking under the heavy Turkish sun. Slowly, the camera pans across to reveal a young man pulling up at a petrol station. He gets out of his car and greets the mechanic, ‘Happy Bayram’. It is a holiday, and the man is driving along the Black Sea Coast. (We later discover the holiday is Kurban Bayram, the sacrifice festival.) Inside the station, he buys some snacks. It is hot. His shirt sticks, and drops of sweat linger on the back of his neck. After a brief exchange with the attendant about the music that is playing, the man drives along the coast road.
Although very little is revealed in this opening sequence, the visual beauty and measured pace of the film are established. It is this pacing, the still shots followed by slow pans that makes the film so watchable, and hangs it together across vast temporal shifts. Time is a theme at the heart of this film, and this is reflected in its non linear construction. The narrative shifts are simply cut between rather than marked, which gives the film the sensation of spanning several different times simultaneously.
The theme of time is further explored in the cross-generational relationships of father and son, mother and daughter, as well as in the constant push of old and new in both Hamburg and Istanbul. Akin’s Istanbul shares the melancholy of Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul. In Istanbul: Memories of a City, he writes, ‘For me [Istanbul] has always been a city of ruins and of end-of-empire melancholy…I love the overwhelming melancholy when I look at the walls of old apartment buildings and the dark surfaces of neglected, fallen down wooden mansions: only in Istanbul have I seen this texture, this shading.’ In The Edge of Heaven, the buildings are both new and old. Beside Nejat’s refurbished apartment building is a similar building in decay. The walls are crumbling, the paint almost all gone, the windows smashed in. All cities have these polarities but here it is particularly marked. The old and new are connected, sharing the same wall.
Similar in structure to the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu, where several stories take place at the same time, The Edge of Heaven shows it’s characters attempting to link up and not succeeding. Ayten drives past Yeter going in the opposite direction on a bus. Nejat rips down the photo of Yeter a few moments before Lotte comes into his shop. While these near misses feel a little contrived, the sheer visual beauty of the film and the superb performances save it from ever being irritating. My cinema going companion felt the religious allusions brought in toward the end when Nejat relates the story of Ibrahim and Ishmail were a little heavy handed, but I felt that it was right for Nejat’s character, who despite his youth is probably the most traditional character in the film. After all, he spends his life enmeshed in the past, and in the realm of thought – lecturing on Goethe, surrounded by the words of dead philosophers, while his father’s greatest desire on being released from jail was to go fishing.
