The Edge of Heaven

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.