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The Edge Of Heaven (Auf Der Anderen Seite)

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Cert: 15

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Dir: Fatih Akin. Cast: Nurgul Yesilcay, Baki Davrak, Nursel Kose, Tuncel Kurtiz

 

Description: Seventy-something Ali is alone, apart from his university professor son Nejat, and seeks emotional and physical comfort in the arms of prostitutes. He is especially enamoured with straight-talking Yeter and offers her money to stay with him rather than work the streets. She agrees, forming a close bond with the old man and his son. However, tragedy strikes and the story moves to Turkey where Yeter's activist daughter Ayten is on the run from the authorities under an assumed name. Fleeing her home country, Ayten ends up in Hamburg where an affair with a politician's daughter has far-reaching consequences.

Country: GER/TUR. 2007. 121mins
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Love and lust

By Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard  21.02.08
 
The Edge of Heaven

Turkish delight: Ali (Tursel Kurtiz) embarks on a fatal plan with a prostitute (Nursel Kose)

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Faith Akin, the German-born Turkish writer-director who won fame and major festival awards with Head-On, has now made five films. This is his least melodramatic and most assured.

Shot in Germany and Turkey, it follows the fortunes of four Turks and two Germans as their lives fatefully intertwine.

One of them is Ali (Tursel Kurtiz, one of Turkey's best actors), a septuagenarian who goes to a brothel and asks his favourite prostitute (Nursel Kose) to live with him. He has a heart attack with the effort of trying to be young again and then kills her by accident after a quarrel.

His son (Baki Davrak), a professor at a German university teaching sleepy students about revolutionary ideas, is disgusted.

He seeks out the prostitute's daughter (Nurgul Yesilkay) to assuage his imprisoned father's guilt.

The girl forms a sexual liaison with a radical young German woman (Patrycia Ziolkowska) whose mother (Hanna Schygulla, a veteran of Fassbinder films) betrays her to the Turkish authorities.

This seemingly convoluted plot, dealing unobtrusively with divergent cultures, love and forgiveness, slowly but surely and without any false drama, makes its points about a fractured society striving for some sort of happiness.

The acting alone justifies it - but Akin's new-found skill at whispering rather than shouting at his audience (as he did in the heavily accented Head-On) makes this a satisfying drama.

It seems to drift occasionally - there are scenes which don't push the story forward, like the frightening experience of the prostitute faced with two religious fundamentalists on a bus - but there's hardly ever a purposeless moment.

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