Released in the English market as The Edge of Heaven, this examination of lives straddling the barbed fence between the EU and non-EU worlds, here Germany and Turkey, rarely goes for pat answers in either characterisation or plot.The film opens in Bremen with a widowed immigrant's offer to a compatriot prostitute to share his loneliness. Their respective situations are neither sentimentalised nor overly bleakened. Throughout, the film benefits from a matter-of-fact approach to the admittedly over-familiar subject matter, which allows the central concerns of the director - split cultural identity, the attachment between people, and the iniquity of systems which hinder these attachments - to come crisply through the simple interplay of situations with the characters' desires.
Akin's script treads the tightrope between moralising and reportage with an assured style, somewhat reminiscent of Michael Winterbottom's, and serves up perhaps its greatest rewards in its depictions of how people deal with personal loss.
8/10
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