Auf der anderen Seite
Fatih Akin (2007)
This is an original screenplay yet the film, without being in the least ‘literary’, has the texture of a novel in a way that cinema adaptations of novels rarely do. It’s divided into three main parts – ‘Yeter’s Death’, ‘Lotte’s Death’ and ‘The Edge of Heaven’ – but those ‘chapter’ headings aren’t the explanation. It’s more to do with the accumulating strength and meaning of the people in the story – and a sense that, as they move geographically (to and from Germany and Turkey), Fatih Akin is also moving inwards to explore and reveal character. A documentary about the making of the picture, directed by Akin’s wife Monique and one of the special features on the DVD, is illuminating in many ways. One of the most remarkable things I learned from it is that Akin, with his editor Andrew Bird, completely restructured the film after viewing it in the cutting room and deciding that its dramatic arc didn’t work. If I understood Akin right, the structure of the screenplay made for a more fragmented narrative, intercutting between the three strands which, in the film’s final form, comprise its sections. Watching Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s 21 Grams left me suspecting that the initial script had a conventional linear shape and that the narrative splintering was designed not only to create superficial complexity but to conceal the fact that the story lacked the dramatic legs to be told straightforwardly. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of Inarritu’s Babel (where the structural trickiness is more justified by the interconnectedness of the film’s four narratives). In reworking The Edge of Heaven, Akin appears to have done virtually the opposite. A few sequences are repeated for dramatic effect: for example, a moment in the first part recurs in the second and the prologue to the whole film is reprised at its climax in the third section. But for the most part the storytelling is uncomplicated; and each part develops so naturally and fluently that it’s hard to credit the major reshaping that Akin has done.
In ‘Yeter’s Death’, Ali, an elderly Turkish immigrant living in Bremen, visits a prostitute; she turns out to be Turkish too. Her professional name is Jessy, her real name Yeter. Ali asks her to give up her job and live with him: he’ll pay her more than she earns turning tricks. Yeter is threatened by two other Turks, who regard what she does for a living as shaming her country and the Muslim religion. She agrees to move in with Ali and meets his son Nejat, a professor of German literature working at a university in nearby Hamburg. Ali has a heart attack; when he’s released from hospital, he’s increasingly anxious to know whether Yeter and Nejat have had sex in his absence. In an argument with Yeter, Ali knocks her to the ground; she hits her head as she falls and dies instantly. Yeter has explained to Nejat that she’s lost touch with her daughter Ayten, who’s still in Turkey. Yeter’s work – which she’s told Ayten is a sales job in a shoe shop – is the means of paying for her daughter’s higher education. After Ali has been imprisoned for Yeter’s death, Nejat disowns his father and travels to Istanbul in the hope of finding Ayten and assuming responsibility for funding her studies. With his cousin, he visits Yeter’s family, trying to find out more about the girl and asking for photos. There are none of Ayten as an adult so he puts up posters which show Yeter’s picture and ask ‘Do you know this woman?’ Nejat wanders into a German bookshop in the city, which is for sale; he talks with the owner, who is homesick for Germany. Nejat quits his job in Hamburg, buys the bookshop, and moves to Istanbul.
In ‘Lotte’s Death’, a young political activist escapes from the Turkish police during a civil rights demonstration, finding refuge in an apartment block where she hides a gun on the roof. Fellow activists get the girl out of Turkey and into Germany with a false name and passport: she looks for her mother in Bremen’s shoe shops. Ayten (whose new name is Gul) has been told by her Turkish friends that the cheapest decent food available in Germany can be found in university canteens. One day she’s wandering round a campus, completely skint, and asks a girl student to lend her money for food. This is Lotte, who does more than pay for lunch: she takes Ayten to stay in the house of her mother, Susanne. The two girls become lovers and Lotte determines, in spite of her mother’s hostile unease about housing an illegal immigrant, to help Ayten find Yeter. When the police stop Lotte’s car one night and ask to see their documents, Ayten panics and starts shouting for political asylum. A months-long attempt to obtain asylum, financially supported by Susanne, fails in court and Ayten is deported to Turkey Lotte follows her there and learns, to her horror, that Ayten faces a lengthy prison sentence. Lotte decides to abandon her university studies to devote herself to Ayten but Susanne loses patience and refuses to subsidise her daughter’s life in Istanbul. Lotte, trying to find somewhere inexpensive to live, goes into the German bookshop, where she pins a card, asking about a room, on the board next to the poster of Yeter’s picture. Lotte learns from Nejat, now the owner of the bookshop, that he has a room to let and she takes it. She eventually gets to see Ayten in prison and follows her instructions to recover the gun hidden on the roof of the apartment block. Shortly afterwards, a gang of street kids pester Lotte to buy from them. They then steal her bag in which the gun is now hidden. Her desperate pursuit of the thieves ends with one of them pointing the gun at her, pulling the trigger and – to his and his mates’ surprise – shooting Lotte dead.
In ‘The Edge of Heaven’, Ali is released from prison and returns to Turkey. Susanne comes to Istanbul to find out more about what happened to Lotte and see to her effects, boxed up by Nejat in the room she rented from him. Nejat learns from his cousin that his father has gone back to live in his home town of Trabzon, on the Black Sea – but that Ali assumes that Nejat won’t want to see him. Staying overnight in Lotte’s room after she’s met Nejat, Susanne reads her daughter’s diary: she determines to take on Lotte’s mission of trying to secure Ayten’s freedom and moves into the room in Nejat’s apartment. One morning, she sees a religious procession from the window and asks what it is. Nejat explains that it’s the start of a festival (Bayram) which commemorates the story of Ibrahim and Ishmael – the Muslim equivalent, as Susanne remarks, of Abraham and Isaac. Nejat describes how the story worried him as a child, so much so that he asked his father if he would sacrifice his son if necessary. ‘What did he say?’ asks Susanne. ‘He said that he would make an enemy of God in order to protect me’, Nejat replies. The recollection makes Nejat aware of the depth of his feelings for the father he’s rejected. He asks Susanne to look after the bookshop for a few days; just as he’s leaving the shop, Nejat removes the photo of Yeter from the pinboard and throws it away. The shooting of Lotte – of a German citizen in Turkey – has become an international incident and the authorities tell Ayten she’ll be treated leniently if she can give them information about how it came to happen. Moved by Susanne’s change of heart, Ayten recants her political activities and is freed (to the disgust of fellow activists in the prison). The penultimate scene is of Susanne and Ayten in the bookshop. Susanne suggests that Ayten also stay at Nejat’s place until she can find a job and somewhere of her own. The final sequence shows Nejat’s arrival in Trabzon. He learns that his father has gone fishing. He sits at the edge of the Black Sea, awaiting Ali’s return.
This synopsis indicates some of the patterning of The Edge of Heaven but does no justice at all to Fatih Akin’s skill in creating this pattern and achieving resonances in it. Describing the film in this way also exposes some implausibilities in the plotting. (Would Yeter’s family be so welcoming to the son of the man whose violence ended her life? Would an Istanbul street kid naturally assume that a gun he’d stolen wasn’t loaded with real bullets? Doesn’t Susanne tell Nejat she’s going to visit a prisoner called Ayten Ozturk?) But what Akin achieves overall turns these flaws into no more than quibbles. The travelling motif is established from the start. The prologue is part of Nejat’s drive to Trabzon; then we see – from his point of view in the driver’s seat – the road ahead, as the car passes through tunnels and again into daylight. There’s a scene that takes place on a bus and shots of train journeys in the course of ‘Yeter’s Death’, preceding the unloading of her coffin from a plane at Istanbul airport. That image is mirrored when we see Lotte’s coffin at the start of its journey back to Germany. This symmetry may sound obvious, even crude. It never feels that way because Akin weaves it into his exploration of the theme of home – of where people come from and where their first emotional allegiances lie – and that theme is so rich. When Ali first realises Yeter is Turkish he’s briefly doubtful about paying for sex with her; once he’s started doing so, her nationality makes her a particularly attractive means of alleviating his loneliness. ‘All I want is for you to live with me and sleep with me’, he says. (And when Yeter is menaced by her two bigoted countrymen on a Bremen bus, the domestic arrangement which Ali has offered is a kind of political asylum.) We see eventually the complexity of Nejat’s motives for returning to Turkey: he not only wants, for the sake of Yeter, to find and help her daughter; he’s also drawn back to his fatherland at a time when he’s cut himself off from his father. (He’s attracted too by the prospect of spending his days in Istanbul but in the haven of a bookshop full of the German literature he loves.)
Fatih Akin was born in Hamburg but his father hails from the Trabzon area. Akin’s own feelings about Turkey, the extent to which it’s part of him and partly alien to him, are essential to The Edge of Heaven – in terms of what he leaves out as well as what he includes. In the repeated sequence of Nejat’s journey to Trabzon, when he stops for petrol and provisions at a garage store, music is playing on a radio and he asks the proprietor who the singer is. When he’s told, Nejat admits he’s never heard of Kazim Koyuncu. The proprietor explains that Koyuncu is very popular in the Black Sea region, that he died a couple of years ago – ‘about the same age as you’. Akin explains in the DVD feature that this conversation replicates his own experience. (He got hooked on Koyuncu’s music, which haunts the film’s soundtrack, and interested in the demonstrations that took place to raise awareness of the long-term effects of Chernobyl, believed to have caused Koyuncu’s cancer.) Baki Davrak as Nejat receives what the store proprietor says with a flicker of startlement that brings the exchange into sharp focus. Restructuring what he’d shot, however, resulted in Akin’s excising a whole section of the film which described Nejat’s relationship with an old girlfriend with whom he meets up again on his return to Trabzon. Although these cuts were primarily a consequence of the revised shape of the picture (the subplot didn’t fit comfortably into any one section), reviewing what he’d shot also enabled Akin to see that this strand of the story had meanings for him that he’d not been able to convey in what he’d shot. His many qualities as a film-maker evidently include a perceptive humility.
When Nejat and Susanne go out for dinner in Istanbul, they raise their glasses. Nejat asks, ‘What shall we drink to?’ and Susanne answers, ‘To death’. Death has taken Lotte and the toast is partly an acknowledgement of its power (perhaps the titles of the film’s first two chapters do something similar – one death after another). Yet Lotte’s death has also provided her mother with an opportunity to forgive and help Ayten, and to find meaning in her own life. When she first meets Ayten, Lotte says she’s recently returned from travelling in India. When Susanne arrives in Istanbul, she tells Nejat she was in the city once before – as a student in the late 1970s, en route to travelling in India: ‘It was what you did in those days’. Susanne’s moments of illumination occur as she falls asleep and as she awakes next morning in Nejat’s apartment. Just before she starts drowsing, Susanne reads from her daughter’s diary: an extract in which Lotte writes that she can’t understand why her mother can’t seem to understand her – because, Lotte believes, she’s now very like what Susanne was at the same age. When she opens her eyes, Susanne sees Lotte standing at the foot of the bed, looking radiantly happy. In a beautiful shot, Lotte disappears from the screen and we notice that her vanishing causes her mother no surprise or distress. The vision of her daughter and the impression that the diary has made on Susanne bring about a change of heart which is one of the most persuasive epiphanies I can remember seeing on the cinema screen. She’s lost the person who mattered most in her life (she’s separated or divorced from Lotte’s father); she’s lost the world that revolved around Lotte – yet Susanne apprehends that, when your world has been destroyed, you might be freer to create a new one. It’s as if the years between Susanne’s visits to Istanbul have fallen away: she’s starting again from scratch because Lotte has been extinguished; at the same time, Susanne’s new life takes strength from Lotte.
The Edge of Heaven (in its completed version) brings to mind Paul Haggis’s Crash – where the improbable, repeated collisions between a small number of characters within a large urban population were used as a crude but dramatically effective means of expressing the film’s larger theme of interracial tensions and coexistence in Los Angeles. Akin’s film virtually reverses this idea: characters deriving from the different parts of the story are occasionally, and tantalisingly, within touching distance of each other but they keep failing to meet in ways that would resolve matters. Akin is too intelligent to do this over-schematically, however. (When Nejat decides to buy the bookshop, the German owner laughs at the symmetry of their changing places – it’s as if Akin is warning himself not to go too far with the idea.) He shows people coinciding as well as missing each other – and he does it in a way that makes the coincidences seem the product as much of chance as of screenwriting design (as when Ali and Susanne are standing next to each other at customs at Istanbul airport). The devices used in The Edge of Heaven are much more complex – and more enduring – than those of Crash (a Chinese meal of a picture). The plotting also conveys the idea of how little mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, however much they care, may know or understand each other. Ali has no apparent pride in Nejat’s successful academic career – except that he ‘earns good money’, which Ali thinks he can rely on if the live-in whore arrangement proves too expensive. Ayten thinks her mother sells shoes, Yeter that her daughter is getting on with her studies in Turkey.
In the DVD feature Akin tells how desperately eager he was to work with Hanna Schygulla and Tuncel Kurtiz – emblematic figures in the work of Fassbinder and the Turkish director Silnaz Gurney respectively. (I’d never seen either actor before.) Akin also describes how, during filming, he was dissatisfied by what Schygulla was doing, which he found ‘imprecise but overdone’; he was then amazed by what came through when he watched the rushes. What Akin saw and at first didn’t like in Schygulla’s performance may have been a reflection of its originality. When we’re introduced to Susanne at her home, Schygulla gives her a blend of lethargy and vehemence which is compelling but far from likeable. She suggests a woman whose resentment of Ayten’s invasion of her house also hints at a buried fury that her own life has run out of steam. Schygulla is wonderfully eloquent clearing things from the breakfast table or arranging fruit in a flan case: her movements speak depths of dissatisfaction. After Lotte’s death, when she arrives in Istanbul, Susanne gets herself drunk on the contents of the hotel room minibar but it doesn’t have the stupefying effect intended: Hanna Schygulla’s rendering of Susanne’s grief – throwing herself around the room, so helpless that she can’t even make gestures that properly express her desolation – is extraordinary and affecting. Tuncel Kurtiz is very fine as Ali: he shows this old man’s dynamism and love of sensual life and his possessive, blinkered viciousness as two sides of the same coin.
Nursel Kose is marvellous as Yeter: the contrast between the look of the prostitute Jessy and the unpainted Yeter we see on the bus is naturally striking. What’s so good about Kose’s portrait is how, scene by scene, she then removes further layers of the face that Yeter has prepared ‘to meet the faces that you meet’. It’s a more subtle process than the removal of the Jessy make-up but no less powerful in what it reveals – and doesn’t reveal: at the end, Yeter is emotionally exposed but still has a quality of guardedness. I found myself conscious – admittedly more on a second viewing of the film – that ‘Lotte’s Death’, although it soon develops a life and momentum of its own, has to articulate with what’s gone before: to that extent it feels preconceived in a way that ‘Yeter’s Death’ never does. The younger actresses playing Ayten and Lotte are at a slight disadvantage too: by the time they get together (we don’t know who Ayten is when she’s seen in a single shot in the film’s first section), we’ve developed an idea of what Akin is doing. (Hanna Schygulla is at the same disadvantage in theory – but only in theory.) The beautiful Nurgul Yesilcay, who plays Ayten, is a big name in Turkey and Akin was aware that casting her as a lesbian activist was unlikely to go down well there. Yesilcay plays the role intelligently: she has an evident respect for the character, which doesn’t prevent her showing Ayten’s rather alienating intransigence. I was less convinced by Patrycia Ziolkowska as Lotte. She’s vivid but her intensity is a bit self-aware; there are moments such as Lotte’s phone call to Susanne from Istanbul where Ziolkowska takes up and holds a position which looks to be more for dramatic effect than it’s natural (although this is a fault to lay at Akin’s door as much as the actress’s).
The pivotal performance is Baki Davrak’s as Nejat. Akin brought in Davrak at a late stage of the pre-shooting rehearsal period, when he realised the actor he’d originally cast as Nejat wasn’t going to work in the role. Davrak’s self-effacing quality is exceptionally effective: it’s not only a believable part of Nejat but also helps the character to function successfully as the film’s central consciousness (and as Akin’s alter ego). Nejat’s quiet watchfulness also creates complicity with the audience. He’s rarely moved to anger: when he is (and it’s usually something to do with Ali that causes the anger), you really notice. Davrak is also convincing as someone not only highly intelligent but who loves books and positively believes in education. (Nejat thinks better of Yeter as soon as he learns what her work as a prostitute is paying for back in Turkey. I didn’t understand the significance of the book that he gives Ali early in the story and which the old man looks at again, with tears in his eyes, on his return to Turkey.) I suspect that Nejat is a more successful character because Akin removed the old flame section of the film. What we’re left with shows a man who keeps his sexual life private: ‘A gentleman doesn’t answer a question like that’, says Nejat when Ali asks him who he’s screwing at the moment; and Akin keeps it uncertain as to whether Nejat and Yeter do go to bed while Ali is in hospital. It might have detracted from Nejat’s reserved mystery if we’d seen him explicitly in love. Baki Davrak is enormously skilful: he shows enough of what Nejat is feeling and thinking for us to understand a good deal about the man and keep rooting for him – but he retains an elusive quality.
That elusiveness makes Davrak’s Nejat exactly the right protagonist for The Edge of Heaven because it’s an essential quality of the whole piece. Akin’s themes are clear, and intellectually and emotionally stimulating but I know that, in trying to describe this film, I’ve not fully comprehended it. (One thing I really don’t get is the English title. Akin says he decided the working title in German – ‘Auf der anderen Seite das Leben’ (‘On the other side of life’) – was over the top so cut it down to Auf der anderen Seite. ‘On the Other Side’ is much stronger and more apt than The Edge of Heaven, a title which reintroduces the vague, metaphysical implication that Akin seemed keen to shed.) Among those interviewed in the DVD documentary is Andreas Thiel, who produced The Edge of Heaven and Akin’s earlier film Head On. (Thiel also has a cameo in the film, as an official in the German embassy in Turkey.) He talks about the challenge of following up Head On but is pleased with the result. He acknowledges the later film’s relative complexity and that it’s hard to summarise what it’s about; he reckons it’s a more mature film than Head On. Hearing Thiel talk in this way is poignant. He died, aged 48, just as shooting was completed and The Edge of Heaven is dedicated to him. Thiel must have been talking about the film as he had seen it in on the page then in rushes but his comments, as a description of the final cut, could hardly be more accurate. I don’t know of a more exciting film-maker at work just now than Fatih Akin. He hadn’t turned thirty when he made the excellent Head On in 2003 and The Edge of Heaven is one of the best new pictures I’ve seen in recent years.
6 August 2009