Edge of Heaven

Rating:

* * * *

Verdict:

Nuanced and sophisticated Cannes-honoured drama of missed connections verges on greatness.

German-born of Turkish parents, director Akin made 2004's

Head On

, an angry and exhilaratingly brilliant drama about two damaged and fragile immigrants who find love in the most unpromising circumstances. His nuanced and sophisticated new film, a Cannes screenplay-award winner last year, also explores the ties that fail to bind us, but finds a sense of hope in our profound power to forgive.

If it seems at first to be one of those that relies on the hugely fashionable device of interlocking storylines, the hook here is that the characters always just fail to interlink: since that is what the film is about; form becomes content.

The intricate but never obscure plot, which involves three parents and their three adult children, is a bona fide masterpiece of plotting, full of twists that may seem improbable but work because they illustrate how human affairs are so often complicated mixtures of near misses and mistaken intentions. And the twists are never cheap surprises, because Akin signals them with chapter headings - one announces a character's death - that load them with dread: we know what is coming but we can't fathom why.

In Bremen, lonely Turkish emigre widower Ali (Kurtiz) sets up house with Yeter (Kose), a blowsy but good-hearted hooker whom he has rescued from the street - and the perils of the Islamic morals police - by becoming a permanent client. When the arrangement falls apart for reasons no one expects, his son Nejat (Davrak) heads to Istanbul in search of Yeter's estranged daughter, Ayten (Yesilcay). But Ayten, who has her own problems, is heading the other way.

A bald summary doesn't begin to touch the story's manifold dramatic ironies: there are two other principal characters, including one played by the incandescent Schygulla, Fassbinder's siren in the 1970s, who is still as good as ever. It is a film of deep dramatic resonance and also profoundly human, a work of considerable mastery that is sure to place it among the best of my year.

Let's hope that America, where Akin is making a film now, doesn't ruin him.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Baki Davrak, Nursel Kose, Hanna Schygulla, Tuncel Kurtiz, Nurgul Yesilcay, Patrycia Ziolkowska.

Director:

Fatih Akin

Running time:

122 mins

Rating: M

(contains violence, offensive language and sex scenes)

Screening:

Bridgeway, Lido, Rialto