Faith Akin, the German-born Turkish writer-director who won fame and major festival awards with Head-On, has now made five films. This is his least melodramatic and most assured.
Shot in Germany and Turkey, it follows the fortunes of four Turks and two Germans as their lives fatefully intertwine.
One of them is Ali (Tursel Kurtiz, one of Turkey's best actors), a septuagenarian who goes to a brothel and asks his favourite prostitute (Nursel Kose) to live with him. He has a heart attack with the effort of trying to be young again and then kills her by accident after a quarrel.
His son (Baki Davrak), a professor at a German university teaching sleepy students about revolutionary ideas, is disgusted.
He seeks out the prostitute's daughter (Nurgul Yesilkay) to assuage his imprisoned father's guilt.
The girl forms a sexual liaison with a radical young German woman (Patrycia Ziolkowska) whose mother (Hanna Schygulla, a veteran of Fassbinder films) betrays her to the Turkish authorities.
This seemingly convoluted plot, dealing unobtrusively with divergent cultures, love and forgiveness, slowly but surely and without any false drama, makes its points about a fractured society striving for some sort of happiness.
The acting alone justifies it - but Akin's new-found skill at whispering rather than shouting at his audience (as he did in the heavily accented Head-On) makes this a satisfying drama.
It seems to drift occasionally - there are scenes which don't push the story forward, like the frightening experience of the prostitute faced with two religious fundamentalists on a bus - but there's hardly ever a purposeless moment.
The Edge Of Heaven (Auf Der Anderen Seite)
Cert: 15
