bold and brave

The Edge of Heaven


**** (Cert 15)

Peter Bradshaw
Friday February 22, 2008
The Guardian


The Turkish-German director Fatih Akin's new film has been given a poetic English title for its UK release, but the German original, Auf der Anderen Seite, "On the Other Side", is better. This is an intriguing, complex, beautifully acted and directed piece of work, partly a realist drama of elaborate coincidences, near-misses and near-hits, further tangled with shifts in the timeline - and partly an almost dreamlike meditation with visual symmetries and narrative rhymes.

It is about the tension between Germany and Turkey, to whom postwar West Germany opened its doors for "guest-worker" labourers, thereby getting an economic boost but creating for itself an unacknowledged quasi-imperial legacy of guilt and cultural division. And it is about the gulf between the first- and second-generation Turkish-Germans, conflicted about their identity and their relation with the old country, itself conflicted as it prepares to join the European Union.

on a more superficial note
dear hanna schygulla is still one of the finest actresses around and this film is no exception but can we take a moment and note, age does ravage.
now

then