Written and directed by Fatih Akin, “The Edge of Heaven” is a shimmering mosaic of exquisitely delicate counterpoint that nonetheless questions the modern inflation of applauding or expecting the orderly development of destiny. Above all it is a film about listening and liminal space. The messages these voices would bring are equally drowned out in the staid complacency of the university and by the deafening refrain of political radicals. Inner liberation as well as survival, growth and the possibilities of joy and fulfillment require being tuned in to what moment to moment events may be communicating.
Six characters, like the voices of a fugue, comprise three couples of parent and child, though their energic affinities lie along different lines of sympathy.
Ali, a Turkish national and pensioner who has worked his adult life in Germany and was widowed early, still has the vitality and desire in his senior years to seek out a prostitute. She, Yeter, turns out to be Turkish as well. Ali offers her a home with him, matching her current earnings, if she will sleep only with him. A better life for each, he reckons. After being threatened by Islamic vigilantes, Yeter accepts the offer, denying to herself that Ali will make sexual demands.
When he does, she hears neither the context of his demand nor the echo of her agreement. Shouting a false and belligerent declaration of her independence, Yeter punctuates her fury by pushing him violently away. In a rage at her refusal Ali slaps her; Yeter falls, hitting her head on a sharp edge and dies. He is sent to jail. Release for Ali comes only after his sentence is completed and he is deported back to Turkey, to the small town from which his journey began.
Ali’s son Nejat is a professor of German Literature at a university in Hamburg. Where his father is fiery and active, he is reflective and demure. He rejects the father he sees as a lecherous murderer. In an attempt to compensate for his father’s crime, Nejat goes to Istanbul to seek out Ayten, the daughter of his father’s accidental victim. She is nowhere to be found. What Nejat does find is a German language bookstore for sale whose owner wants to return to his homeland. Surprisingly more at home in Istanbul than the German university classroom, Nejat hears in this chance encounter an inner voice that harmonizes the divergent sonorities of his love of German and his awakened awareness of heritage.
Ayten, the missing daughter of the now dead mother, sees herself as a revolutionary and does take life-threatening risks. At a political rally, a plainclothes policeman is overpowered by the mob; his revolver falls and lands at Ayten’s feet. Quick and volatile, she grabs the gun, manages to escape the police and hides the weapon on the roof of a nondescript residential apartment building.
Ayten comes to Germany under an alias and tries to follow the clues that she hopes will lead to her mother, but Yeter has also been living under a kind of alias, disguising her real career from her daughter. Instead Ayten meets Charlotte, a university student her own age, who quickly grows infatuated with Ayten and brings the beautiful dark foreigner home to her bourgeois mother’s house. An unexpected romance develops between the two young women.
Charlotte’s mother, Susanna, does not wholly approve of or agree with her daughter’s desires and actions but she supports her. In a confrontation with Ayten, Susanna sees through the younger woman's political posturing and demands only that in her house Ayten not use vulgar language. In Susanna's simple delineating stand, Ayten is reminded of the mother she does not have.
In the search to find Yeter, Ayten is discovered by the authorities and must go through the lengthy and expensive process of seeking political asylum, paid for by Susanna. Ayten’s petition is denied on the grounds that her country is close to achieving a full western identity as an EU member. Like Ali, the illegal Ayten is returned to Turkey, though she now goes to jail for her former political activities.
As Nejat went in search of the to him unknown Ayten, Charlotte’s quest is to help her imprisoned lover. Susanna pleads with Charlotte to leave Istanbul and return home to her studies, to her own life. When Charlotte refuses, claiming that now she has found her life, Susanna withdraws her financial support. Through the bulletin board at the German bookstore now owned and run by Nejat, Charlotte comes to rent a room in his apartment.
In prison, Ayten is threatened by her former radical associates to turn over the gun she hid so long before. She enlists Charlotte’s help in recouping the hidden object, not revealing what it is.
Charlotte makes the parallel error to that of Ayten’s mother, Yeter. She focuses on what she wants out of life at the moment and forgets the reality of her outer environment. After retrieving the revolver, her bag is stolen by a gang of street urchins when she tries to brush off their entreaties for the blond foreigner to buy gum and tissues.
She brazenly chases after them and later, suddenly and unexpectedly, comes across the boys in an empty lot off a narrow side street as they wonder and marvel at the huge silver weapon. As she angrily screams her demand for the return of the gun, one of the boys pointlessly and unintentionally kills her.
In an attempt to understand her sorrowful loss, Susanna comes to Istanbul, to Nejat’s apartment, to collect the few belongings that are all that remain of her beloved daughter. She asks to spend the night in her daughter’s old room and falls asleep reading Charlotte’s diary. Susanna is awakened at dawn with the brilliant vision of her smiling daughter.
Though Charlotte could not listen to the world around her, she had listened to the inner voice that led her where it could. The vision attests to the complex fulfillment of a short life that it is difficult not to see as tragic. Susanna takes on her daughter’s wish and determination to help Ayten, who finds the parent she deeply needs in Charlotte’s anguished and willing mother.
Susanna happens to ask Nejat about his own father. She and Nejat share the ability to reflect on their experience, to patiently listen to the voices that would speak against habit and reflex, even against their former ideas of themselves. Nejat has a kind of epiphany, not unlike Susanna’s, through which he glimpses how the power of accident can re-route a life and is led toward the inevitable understanding of who his father is: a man he must forgive and embrace.
In this era the edge of heaven can only be approached through the personal encounter. Ali is freed from a meaningless, lonely and repetitious existence as a mere consumer in an inhospitable though highly developed world; Nejat enters into a life he previously could not have imagined or valued and comes to see his father’s essence; Ayten and Susanna encounter their shared ability to feel and act with courage. Without the two deaths, none of these revelations would occur. Redemption is only for those with the inner freedom to step outside their own trajectory and direct their voyage home.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Silent Light (Stellet licht)
Mexican director Carlos Reygadas’ third feature, “Silent Light”, takes place nominally in a Mennonite community in northern Mexico. The film’s combination of universal fable and magical realism is apparent from the first scene- a long shot of deep outer space. A galaxy slowly coalesces into the center of the image and continues its crystalline condensation toward earth as the spiraling Milky Way yields to preternaturally glimmering stars scattered along the lacy silhouette of a day-glow dawn emerging through a thicket of foliage and trees, propelled by the disembodied cries and calls of roaming wild animals.
The ominous sounds give way to the ticking clock in a brightly lit farmhouse kitchen where a farmer, his wife and family sit in silent meditation before their morning meal. The story that unfolds is of Johan’s struggle to honor his love for his wife, Esther and his attraction to Marianne, the woman with whom he is having an affair. He has kept no secrets from his wife, who patiently, supportively and lovingly awaits his decision. Johan wants to believe his liaison with Marianne could be spiritually ordained. His anguish and vacillation are evidence of his uncertainty as to which commitment is his true fate.
Long scenes of rugged landscape in wide-angle inclusiveness or pinpoint detail are punctuated with architectural vignettes that carry a deep relevance and resonance for the unfolding narrative. All of the architecture depicted is straightforward and ordinary; nothing is even slightly unusual. Through placement and direction, shape, size, color and lighting, these simple rectangles and boxes take on narrative associations far more complex than their modest purity would imply.
The first structure depicted is the farmhouse itself. Matter of fact in the extreme, its capacious interior is entirely unsurprising. Outside is another story: the large L-shaped main house nestles a small separate cottage set off to one side, seemingly uninhabited. Already we understand that there is something that the main house cannot contain.
Johan goes to pick up a repaired engine part from his friend Zacarias’ auto shop. The huge cavern of the shop’s work area is just a large box with one side that opens entirely, as with a roll-down garage door. Under the blazing morning sun the interior is as black as the underworld; undecipherable overlays of music and talk radio pour out of the mechanics’ workspace, though they are nowhere to be seen. Zacarias and his helpers are working down in a grave-like opening, which on second thought is not in the least unusual at a shop that repairs engines, trucks and cars.
The building that adjoins the dark workshop is a smaller plain white clapboard façade, as shallow in appearance as the workshop is deep. The wall is punctuated with a brown door and two small windows like closed eyes; their plain plastic shades are drawn down tight. Zacarias knows of Johan’s affair and that the two lovers are about to meet; he encourages Johan’s wish to believe that Marianne might be his “natural” woman.
Low to the ground the camera traces Johan’s steps as he climbs a hillock to join Marianne. A flat stone wall brings all movement to a halt. Three dark upright rectangular openings, possibly three doors in a game of chance or a reference to Calvary, speak irredeemably of fate. Johan is barely visible in the central opening, showering, trying to cleanse himself.
Seeking advice from his father, Johan goes to his parents’ farm. As the two converse in a snow covered field, we see a huge solid gray barn- old but implacable- it is set with a pair of enormous closed red doors. Like the united parents themselves, the barn and doors stand firm and present, their responsibility and gift are only to witness.
The seasons progress. Huge, indifferent and unrelenting, the metal teeth of a tractor shears the harvested field clean to the ground. Esther not only drives the tractor, but has made and serves the lunch that is interrupted when a messenger arrives and Johan reveals that it is a request from Marianne. Esther’s only comment is that he should take along the children for an overdue visit to the dentist.
Marianne’s world is a spacious gleaming-white truckstop diner so spotless it is impossible to imagine even the possibility of customers or food. She leads Johan to the simple motel bedroom, for what she tells him will be the last time. Afterwards they stand in front of two narrow green buildings; each has a separate external staircase leading to a single room on its second story. A drawn pink curtain marks the room from which they have come. The two buildings are so close it seems impossible that they do not and cannot connect, but they do not.
Johan tries and fails to resist his attraction to Marianne. Marianne’s sincerity and depth are above question. She, too, struggles with the truth of her relationship with Johan and her responsibility to Esther.
In a raging storm that matches her frustration, exhaustion and bottomless sorrow, Esther runs through an open field toward a copse of trees and collapses; she has nothing more to give. Like a discarded cardboard box lying in an empty field, the long low building of the rural hospital tells us the outcome of her ordeal.
Returned to the farm for the rituals and gathering of departure, the family prepares the body and makes their goodbyes. . Marianne arrives and asks to see Esther once before she is buried. The body lies in a white room so empty it appears as if in a ray of light, the companion/opposite to Marianne’s cool yet equally brilliant realm. Unlike the rest of the house that feels to be hermetically sealed, the window of this room is left ajar and the open, empty space becomes a prism connecting the two women’s essential spirits. Marianne leans down and kisses Esther tenderly on the lips, acknowledging fate and forgiveness.
The kiss unites the spheres of death and life in unspoken dialog. Marianne surrenders to her fate of taking Esther’s place. Esther grants her permission and comes to life to speak her gratitude to Marianne. The two youngest daughters enter the room and witness the exchange between their mother and Marianne, understanding that one is passing her earthly mantle to the other, that from now on Marianne is the mother of the children she could not have brought into the world. The girls are still young enough to be amenable to the mixture of the real and spirit worlds and accept this altered reality as they excitedly discuss the unusual proceedings of the day. They do not know what death is, or how long it should last, or how the journey begun in one place or person should find its way to another. The ghost of Marianne leaves the house as Johan’s father resets the clock that was stopped at the story’s start. The girls tell their father that their mother wants to talk to him.
The wide horizon darkens as the sun sets and dissolves into the enormity of the night sky, back to the twinkling stars that began this tale.
The ominous sounds give way to the ticking clock in a brightly lit farmhouse kitchen where a farmer, his wife and family sit in silent meditation before their morning meal. The story that unfolds is of Johan’s struggle to honor his love for his wife, Esther and his attraction to Marianne, the woman with whom he is having an affair. He has kept no secrets from his wife, who patiently, supportively and lovingly awaits his decision. Johan wants to believe his liaison with Marianne could be spiritually ordained. His anguish and vacillation are evidence of his uncertainty as to which commitment is his true fate.
Long scenes of rugged landscape in wide-angle inclusiveness or pinpoint detail are punctuated with architectural vignettes that carry a deep relevance and resonance for the unfolding narrative. All of the architecture depicted is straightforward and ordinary; nothing is even slightly unusual. Through placement and direction, shape, size, color and lighting, these simple rectangles and boxes take on narrative associations far more complex than their modest purity would imply.
The first structure depicted is the farmhouse itself. Matter of fact in the extreme, its capacious interior is entirely unsurprising. Outside is another story: the large L-shaped main house nestles a small separate cottage set off to one side, seemingly uninhabited. Already we understand that there is something that the main house cannot contain.
Johan goes to pick up a repaired engine part from his friend Zacarias’ auto shop. The huge cavern of the shop’s work area is just a large box with one side that opens entirely, as with a roll-down garage door. Under the blazing morning sun the interior is as black as the underworld; undecipherable overlays of music and talk radio pour out of the mechanics’ workspace, though they are nowhere to be seen. Zacarias and his helpers are working down in a grave-like opening, which on second thought is not in the least unusual at a shop that repairs engines, trucks and cars.
The building that adjoins the dark workshop is a smaller plain white clapboard façade, as shallow in appearance as the workshop is deep. The wall is punctuated with a brown door and two small windows like closed eyes; their plain plastic shades are drawn down tight. Zacarias knows of Johan’s affair and that the two lovers are about to meet; he encourages Johan’s wish to believe that Marianne might be his “natural” woman.
Low to the ground the camera traces Johan’s steps as he climbs a hillock to join Marianne. A flat stone wall brings all movement to a halt. Three dark upright rectangular openings, possibly three doors in a game of chance or a reference to Calvary, speak irredeemably of fate. Johan is barely visible in the central opening, showering, trying to cleanse himself.
Seeking advice from his father, Johan goes to his parents’ farm. As the two converse in a snow covered field, we see a huge solid gray barn- old but implacable- it is set with a pair of enormous closed red doors. Like the united parents themselves, the barn and doors stand firm and present, their responsibility and gift are only to witness.
The seasons progress. Huge, indifferent and unrelenting, the metal teeth of a tractor shears the harvested field clean to the ground. Esther not only drives the tractor, but has made and serves the lunch that is interrupted when a messenger arrives and Johan reveals that it is a request from Marianne. Esther’s only comment is that he should take along the children for an overdue visit to the dentist.
Marianne’s world is a spacious gleaming-white truckstop diner so spotless it is impossible to imagine even the possibility of customers or food. She leads Johan to the simple motel bedroom, for what she tells him will be the last time. Afterwards they stand in front of two narrow green buildings; each has a separate external staircase leading to a single room on its second story. A drawn pink curtain marks the room from which they have come. The two buildings are so close it seems impossible that they do not and cannot connect, but they do not.
Johan tries and fails to resist his attraction to Marianne. Marianne’s sincerity and depth are above question. She, too, struggles with the truth of her relationship with Johan and her responsibility to Esther.
In a raging storm that matches her frustration, exhaustion and bottomless sorrow, Esther runs through an open field toward a copse of trees and collapses; she has nothing more to give. Like a discarded cardboard box lying in an empty field, the long low building of the rural hospital tells us the outcome of her ordeal.
Returned to the farm for the rituals and gathering of departure, the family prepares the body and makes their goodbyes. . Marianne arrives and asks to see Esther once before she is buried. The body lies in a white room so empty it appears as if in a ray of light, the companion/opposite to Marianne’s cool yet equally brilliant realm. Unlike the rest of the house that feels to be hermetically sealed, the window of this room is left ajar and the open, empty space becomes a prism connecting the two women’s essential spirits. Marianne leans down and kisses Esther tenderly on the lips, acknowledging fate and forgiveness.
The kiss unites the spheres of death and life in unspoken dialog. Marianne surrenders to her fate of taking Esther’s place. Esther grants her permission and comes to life to speak her gratitude to Marianne. The two youngest daughters enter the room and witness the exchange between their mother and Marianne, understanding that one is passing her earthly mantle to the other, that from now on Marianne is the mother of the children she could not have brought into the world. The girls are still young enough to be amenable to the mixture of the real and spirit worlds and accept this altered reality as they excitedly discuss the unusual proceedings of the day. They do not know what death is, or how long it should last, or how the journey begun in one place or person should find its way to another. The ghost of Marianne leaves the house as Johan’s father resets the clock that was stopped at the story’s start. The girls tell their father that their mother wants to talk to him.
The wide horizon darkens as the sun sets and dissolves into the enormity of the night sky, back to the twinkling stars that began this tale.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
