The Edge of Heaven (***)

Posted on May 23, 2008 by David Balzer

The current cinematic trend towards exploring apparent truths of globalization shows no signs of stopping, and The Edge of Heaven, by director Fatih Akin (Head-On), is bound to impress savvy-seeming audiences and critics alike (it already won best screenplay at Cannes). Concerning a family in Germany and one in Turkey, the film uses two deaths to suggest a sequence of socio-political mirroring and counterbalancing between the two countries, and within the nascent European Union as a whole. But The Edge of Heaven’s topicality and clever, labyrinthine plotting (people keep missing each other by a hair’s breadth) isn’t quite enough: it’s too long (and, consequently, seems a tad self-important) and its characters, though wrapped in Akin’s concerted realism, are largely flat—be they shrill, lesbian student radicals; a sensitive, asexual professor; or an aging, jaded whore.

The Edge of Heaven is now playing at the Cumberland (159 Cumberland St.).

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