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'The Edge of Heaven'

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BY JAN STUART | Special to Newsday

May 23, 2008

Reaching our shores a year after its triumphant premiere at Cannes, Fatih Akin's latest drama is an intricately spun and soul-stirring meditation on fate, family and cultural bridge-building. Deploying a symmetrical triptych format whose events overlap and twist back on themselves like a pretzel, Akin traces the paths of a sextet of individuals variously conjoined by passion, DNA and unforeseeable mutual interests: a crusty Turkish-emigre widower living in Bremen, Germany (Tuncel Kurtiz), and the Turkish prostitute he takes in as his hausfrau-for-hire (Nursel K"se); the prostitute's longestranged political rebel daughter (Nurgül Yesilcay) and the German student who becomes her lover-abettor (Patrycia Ziolkowska); the student's bourgeois mother (Hanna Schygulla); and the Turkish widower's son (the handsomely brooding Baki Davrak), who has made the ultimate second-generation leap by becoming a professor of German studies in Hamburg.

As in his bruising "Head-On," Akin revels in such cross-cultural ironies, but this is a palpably more elegant and compassionate work: The filmmaker cares deeply for all of his characters and forgives them their trespasses. Maybe he feels a tad something more for his two remorseful matriarchs; while all of the actors give sharp, carefully considered performances, we can't shake the sorrowful visages of Schygulla and particularly K"se, who haunts the proceedings long after her all-too-brief moment in the sun has passed.

THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (unrated) Fatih Hanna Schygulla and Baki Davrak head a superb multinational ensemble in this gorgeously rendered drama of six individuals whose relationships crisscross between Germany and Turkey. Eloquently written and directed by Fatih Akin ("Head-On"). 1:56 (brief violence, sexuality). In German and Turkish with English subtitles. At Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington, and Film Forum, Manhattan.