A Crowded Story Teeters on the Edge

There’s always something a little too corny, a little too wishful, about a movie that tries to attach cosmic significance to the seemingly random and meaningless accidents of human behavior. The desire to connect all the errant tangents of, say, a few everyday lives in a big city, as if to illustrate the delicate chemistry that binds unknowing souls together in a magically symbiotic flux, is noble, if quixotic and possibly foolish.Krzysztof Kieslowski pulled it off, masterfully, 20 years ago with “Dekalog.” Hollywood’s version, the Academy Award-laden “Crash,” insulted its audience’s intelligence. Pretentious tripe like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Babel” was no improvement. It seems that the more a filmmaker tries to make intertwining stories serve a social commentary about race-class-ethnic-sexual divides, the more hamfisted the result.The Turkish-German director Fatih Akin makes his own contribution to a jaundiced genre with “The Edge of Heaven,” which begins a two-week-long engagement tomorrow at Film Forum. Despite some overdrawn symbolism, he gets away with it. In fact, he’s made a small masterpiece. Partly, that’s because of the way he 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.Partly, it’s how Mr. Akin utilizes a fantastically gifted cast by way of that cursed looping narrative, which has been a staple since Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” came out in 1994. Here, it’s simply a way to create dramatic tension and universal empathy for a sextet of characters, whom circumstance propels back and forth between Bremen and Istanbul. The film unfolds as a kind of triptych, one in which parallel lives intersect around the eventual passage of two coffins, each carrying a body between Turkey and Germany — but in different directions.The lives of Turkish immigrants and their German-born children is Mr. Akin’s recurrent theme, explored to prize-winning effect in 2004’s “Head-On.” He expands his scope in “The Edge of Heaven,” which twists and tumbles with cross-cultural anxieties as if decoding a Rubik’s Cube.The opening story concerns the relationship between a crusty, traditional Turkish retiree named Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) and his son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), a linguistics professor whose life as an assimilated, modern German stands in bold contrast to his father’s unrefined manner. When the brusque old man takes in Yeter (Nursel Köse), a strong-willed, middle-age prostitute, as his paid companion, Nejat accepts it without judgment. But after suffering a heart attack, Ali suspects his son of sleeping with his consort, and accidentally kills her in a drunken rage. Disowning his father, who is now bound for prison (and eventual deportation), Nejat makes it his mission to find Yeter’s missing daughter, leading him on a life-changing journey back to Istanbul.In the second story, Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay), a young Turkish rebel, flees the country after a politically motivated street riot goes awry. Bumming around a college campus in Bremen (yes, the same one at which Nejat teaches), the moody outsider strikes up a friendship with a bright, ebullient student named Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska). In one of the film’s signature sequences, which Mr. Akin’s camera observes with a free-flowing grace, a drunken night on the town sparks an eruption of desire between the women, who become lovers. Ayten moves in with Lotte, much to the displeasure of her mother (Hanna Schygulla, in a performance that begins small and cranky and ends in a kind of transcendence).As seems inevitable, Ayten is hauled in by German immigration after a routine traffic stop and sent back to Turkey, where she is destined to be charged as a terrorist and sent to prison. Lotte follows in an effort to save her, and winds up renting a room from Nejat, who now runs a bookstore in Istanbul while he continues to look for Yeter’s daughter.Mr. Akin’s third act ties all the coincidences and sometimes overly self-evident ironies together by illuminating the mystery of compassion, the impossibly durable bond between parent and child, and the transformative power of forgiveness. It’s a lot to take on and not slip into the feel-good homilies of “Oprah”-speak. But the director grounds everything in the soulful, emotional reserves of his actors, as well as the delicate gaze of a camera that never feels in a hurry. Andrew Bird’s nuanced, string-driven score, with its elements of Turkish folk music, thoughtfully underpins the visuals. The film’s final shot, which is held for several minutes as the credits roll, is simple and powerful. Nejat sits on a beach, and gazes out at the Black Sea, his heart beating with every lapping wave.Through June 3 (209 W. Houston St., between Sixth Avenue and Varick Street, 212-727-8110).

A Crowded Story Teeters on the Edge

More from the New York Sun

The War Over War Powers

Antisemitism Is the Root of Mamdani Socialism, and It’s Destroying New York City

Why Rod Stewart Mattered So Much to a Teen Boy in Care

France’s Greens Propose Paid Days Off Instead of Air Conditioning To Respond to Heat Waves

Musk Loses Trillionaire Title as SpaceX Shares Tumble

Chevalier Wins, Democrats Panic, and Letitia James Fears Mamdani Has Given Party Its MAGA Moment

James Comey Builds All-Star Legal Team To Thwart Renewed Effort by Trump DOJ To Convict Him

Rubio Tries To Ease Gulf Allies’ Fears of Capitulation to Tehran