Auf der anderen Seite (The Edge of Heaven)
This is another offering from the Turkish-German director of Gegen die Wand (Head On). Both films portray the families and descendants of Turkish emigrants to Germany. Whereas the main characters in Gegen die Wand typically pursued violent and gritty lifestyles that led them through the halls of institutions and prisons, the main characters here originate from a broad variety of backgrounds and earn their livelihoods through occupations as diverse as prostitute and university professor.
Visually, we are presented with an unadorned and forthright documentation of the everyday objects of a modern urban environment, such as the square-cornered Mercedes prison truck, the bourgeois German kitchen and its occupants, and the red-light district in Bremen. The plot evolves primarily as a sequence of extremely unlikely coincidences. In the first of these, the audience’s credulity is initially tested by the proposition put by the father of a young university professor to one of the workers in the aforementioned red light district. He does not propose marriage, but rather suggests an arrangement whereby the woman would live with him as a concubine. Although initially reluctant, she is impelled to accept because of the threat of zealous muslims who disapprove of her lifestyle and warn her to repent and change her ways or else suffer the consequences.
The woman’s entry into the lives of the elderly widower and his son provides the context of the series of events that make up the plot of the entire film. These events are characterised by occasionally extraordinary and incredible coincidences that see the paths of related parties meeting tangentially without their knowledge. These events and tangential meetings are presented out of chronological order in a way that often maximises the sense of surprise experienced by the audience at each moment of revelation. This is especially true of the occasion when the daughter of the woman working in the red light district is revealed to have been present during one of the professor’s lectures, and that he is at the same time actively trying to locate the daughter in order to help fund her university studies.
The entire piece is divided into
three chapters each of which are
are prefixed by their title. The
titles of the first two chapters forewarn the audience that a given character
will meet their end at some point during the chapter. The title of the final segment is
Auf der anderen Seite, and the title's sense is made clear during the first scenes. For the
bourgeois German mother whose daughter is killed in a random shooting incident
in Istanbul, the "other side" is reached with the help of her deceased daughter's diary. Also coincidentally, she
finds this among her daughter's belongings in the room in Istanbul that her daughter had been renting from
the recently relocated university professor
.
In this film we get a strong sense
of the ways in which the German and Turkish people have
lived in each other’s countries for many years, and the depth of the connections between the
peoples that have become thus established. In the latter stages, the positive nature of this geo-political relationship
is given resonance on a human scale through several images of
reconciliation between characters that were previously estranged. While the closing credits
roll over on one side of the screen, on the other side we see the the professor sitting with his back to us on the beach in
the Turkish village to which his estranged father has retreated. Here we leave the the son, having joined his journey
in the opening scenes. As we reflect on that journey, we might also be inclined to speculate as to where that
journey might lead.