The Edge of Heaven.

"A German filmmaker of Turkish descent, Fatih Akin has made hybrid cultures and hyphenated identities his great subject," writes Elbert Ventura at indieWIRE. "Head-On, his acclaimed breakthrough film from 2004, told a love story between two German Turks that wended its way back to the homeland. In The Edge of Heaven, his latest, the fixation on blurred borders and social dislocation continues on a larger canvas. Several characters shuttle back and forth between Turkey and Germany, even as the quest for home and rest seems increasingly quixotic. But let the overstuffed The Edge of Heaven be a lesson: Just multiplying and magnifying your obsessions does not make them any more powerful."

Updated through 5/25.

"The movie is like a Dickens novel with the ends of all the subplots lopped off," writes David Edelstein in New York: "The related characters (six of them) who improbably stray across one another's paths can't see the connections, and the harmonious resolutions you're expecting don't arrive. Frustrating! And yet those frustrations pay off. The Edge of Heaven is powerfully unsettled - it comes together by not coming together."

"Akin's movies, like the works of a major novelist, tend to seek out those thorny, intractable areas of private experience where politics is never going to gain more than a crumbling foothold," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "The Edge of Heaven is, in the best sense, mainstream cinema. It dives into the current that sweeps all of us along: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, anyone leaving home and aching to return."

"Apparently, Akin wanted to communicate a Message to the audience through the relationship between these characters," writes Louis Proyect. "In the press notes, he states that 'Literacy, education, plays a profound role' in his movie and that 'the key element' in the film is reading. Very high-minded stuff. It is too bad that it is not reflected through dramatic action. You're better off reading John Dewey."

Earlier: British reviews (February) and reviews from Cannes 07.

Updates, 5/20: For Steve Dollar, writing in the New York Sun, Edge is "a small masterpiece. Partly, that's because of the way [Akin] stays relentlessly focused on the individual, examining lives tossed up against an often unfathomable geopolitical matrix without ever losing sight of the tiny, finite details that compose their experience."

"While not as egregiously sentimental or simpleminded as another German political melodrama, The Lives of Others, it nearly defines all things political as not just personal, or even familial, but exclusively filial," writes Bill Weber in Slant. "Edge of Heaven seldom goes slack and is bolstered by one transcendent performance in its ensemble, but a certain patness of Akin's Cannes prize-winning screenplay is distancing. Its surviving characters may change their lives and forge new or renewed loves, but rather than singular personalities they're types familiar in cross-cultural movies: the Disillusioned Radical, the Thawed Academic, the Heartbroken/Healing Mother."

Updates, 5/21: "Mr Akin's previous fictional feature, Head-On, was a tour de force, driven by rage and sexual desire, that traveled over similar cultural and geographical terrain at ferocious velocity," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "The Edge of Heaven has a wider scope and a more contemplative, deliberate mood, and if it doesn't match the brutal impact of Head-On it has a cumulative power, both intellectual and emotional, of its own. By the end you know the characters in it so well that you can't believe you've seen the movie only once, yet on a second viewing it seems completely new."

"Examining a Europe whose increasingly porous borders have drastically undermined a longstanding homogeneity is at the center of excellent recent work by Austria's Ulrich Seidl (Import/Export) and Britain's Shane Meadows (Somers Town)," writes Nick Pinkerton in the Voice. "Both films still await a proper US release date, while writer-director Akin once again secures distribution (as he did for his punk-posturing 2004 Head-On) with pseudo-provocations and a superficially deceptive simulacra of Art."

Related news item: "Highly qualified professionals of Turkish descent are leaving Germany because they feel denied opportunities there. In contrast other countries, particularly Turkey, are vying for their talents," reports Michael Sontheimer for Der Spiegel. "Experts warn of the disastrous consequences of this 'fatal' brain drain."

Updates, 5/22: "Those expecting the punkish, masochistic energy of Head-On, with its car-crashing and wrist-cutting and club-hopping, may be a bit surprised by this new film's more measured and contemplative tone," writes Mike D'Angelo at Screengrab. "All the same, Akin's keen intelligence, his sensitivity to cultural dislocation and his skill with actors are all still very much in evidence."

"The Edge of Heaven is unabashedly emotional and patterned around recurring structures and recurring themes and its deep well of sorrow as well as Akin's superbly expressive filmmaking—framing and cutting and a generous eye for the features of city streets and besorrowed faces—demonstrates bold use of craft." Ray Pride talks with Akin for Filmmaker.

"Like Head-On, Edge's final third suffers from a sudden loss of energy, because Akin is the kind of dude who takes concepts like 'redemption' and 'remorse' as seriously as only an alpha male can, which means his previously energetic characters suddenly spend a lot of time staring into space aimlessly," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door. "Alternately galvanizing and turgid, Edge works as giddy melodrama and State Of The EU tract - we're going to be seeing a lot of these in the years to come. Akin's film could benefit from one of the Economist's dispassionate appraisals and explications, but it has enough dramatic steam of its own to travel well."

Updates, 5/23: "The Edge of Heaven's final part is less spectacular by design, and feels a little forced at times, but Akin's multigenerational cast helps give the story a touching sense of perspective," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club.

"Akin, like RWF, updates melodrama," writes Melissa Anderson in Time Out New York. "What distinguishes The Edge of Heaven is that fear, rather than consuming its characters, is vanquished by them."

"The Edge of Heaven is another wondrous creation from one of the world's most versatile writer-directors," writes Michael Tully at Hammer to Nail.

Update, 5/24: "His films have done nothing but improve," argues Jeffrey M Anderson at Cinematical: "his 2000 romantic comedy In July was a delightful summer road movie with a fairly predictable conclusion. His 2005 film Head-On started out like a similar situation romance, but suddenly switched to something more dire and engaging. And now The Edge of Heaven is his most accomplished film yet."

Updates, 5/25: Mark Olsen talks with Akin for the Los Angeles Times.

"[T]he form and content don't mesh at all; the way Faith Akin tells this Turkish-German story could hardly be more generic," argues Steve Erickson in Gay City News.

Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2008 1:28 AM