| Overall Grade: |
C |
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| Story: |
C |
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| Acting: |
B- |
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| Direction: |
C |
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| Visuals: |
B |
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SO SO
by Joe (movies profile)
Jul 19, 2008
Two prefatory remarks:
1) I assume the reader has, can, or will read mainstream reviews, which are readily available on the net – I most often first refer to the “NY Times†and “Variety.†My comments are strictly secondary, not a recapitulation of what has already been said elsewhere.
2) This comment falls into 2 parts:
a) Discussion of the movie itself;
b) Remarks about the politicocultural assumptions underlying it.
Notice has repeatedly been made of the use of the artifice of coincidence in this movie – by now this is a cliché, mostly seen in artsy films which aspire to touch the hem of fate. I would go much further. The movie is a shallow manipulation of characters, moved around like pieces on a chess board. None has much depth or a life of his/her own, but instead each represents a type, a position in society. The movie is ambitious; its attempted scope is the East-West interface which may be the single most important source of tension and change in old Europe. But what the movie gains in breadth it gives up in depth.
Character is sacrificed to plot, and plot to structural symmetry. The actions of the characters are linear, in conformity with the predetermined premise of each, rather than coming unexpectedly out of the fertile, irrational and spontaneous cauldron of primary human experience, that indefinable brew of contradiction, conflict, the subconscious, impulse, guilt, dream, love/hate and the myriad other fluxes which shimmer inside us. We have the sensitive and alienated intellectual Goethe-quoting poet, Nejat Aksu (Baki Davrak), the character presumably closest to that of the author himself ; the randy old goat, his father, Ali Aksu (Tuncel Kurtiz) ; the shining idealistic young revolutionary guard, Ayten Ozturk (Nurgül Yesilçay); the impressionable, rootless middle-class student swept up in her trail, Lotte Staub (Patrycia Ziolkowska); and the old hippie, Lotte’s mother, Susanne Staub (Hanna Schygulla), now settled into bourgeois comfort.
Everything is tidy, symmetrical: three parents, three children, representing old vs. new Germany, which in turn is juxtaposed to old vs. new Turkey. The heavy hand of the author, writer and director Fatih Akin, is everywhere. The greatest strength and most characteristic feature of cinema, as opposed to fiction, is its being locked in the physical reality of the present, in the compelling moment-by-moment unfolding of time. This is what sweeps us up in its fabulous world. “Edge of Heaven,†however, dilutes and corrupts this magic with authorial detachment and control.
Too much has been made in other reviews of the characters’ transformations. When stripped of the glamour and confusion of what “New Yorker†reviewer Anthony Lane calls “the dreamy imprisonment of a movie theatre,†their loves, hates, forgiveness, and redemptions are trite and maudlin.
As to the sociopolitical assumptions that underlie this movie, I find it astonishing that not a single reviewer is in the least bothered by the fact that the central character around which the plot revolves, the fugitive revolutionary Ayten, is a terrorist. We first meet her on the streets of Istanbul, her face covered, her comrades shooting up a peaceful demonstration. The ends justify the means for this “type.†She is married, both figuratively and literally, to the gun; it determines both her fate and much of the plot. Although she ultimately repents and renounces the vulgarity and cowardice of this violence, when her lover is senselessly killed by that very gun, this seems shallow and contrived, mere soap opera, a pallid and weak condemnation of the “activism†the movie otherwise champions. Ironically, the revolutionary is asleep as the intellectual poet Nejat lectures about how Goethe was critical of revolution. Unfortunately, this is little more than literary footnote, remote from the streets, confined to a dull university lecture hall.
Also as remarkable, no one seems to be in the least bothered by the declining virility of the male in cinema. The vital life force here is embodied in two lesbians, a fashionable posture. The male principal, Nejat, is melancholy, passive, and impotent, an asexual observer. It’s as if testosterone has become the sole province of the grotesquely exaggerated comic-book superheroes now glutting the megaplexes.
People wonder what does the title mean? In the last shot, Nejat sits staring at the horizon, where sea and sky meet, waiting to forgive his father. That horizon is the edge of heaven, on which we are all perched, if only we can see it, if only we give ourselves to love and mercy. The movie achieves this resolution too easily, too glibly, too tidily, in the manner of all pop schmaltz. |
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