(Reviews of The Edge of Heaven, The Band’s Visit and 21.)

The Edge of Heaven

The Edge of Heaven (Auf der Anderen Seite) by Fatih Akin, director of the startlingly good Head On (Gegen die Wand), is a masterpiece — one of the finest diaspora flicks I’ve ever seen. It’s set largely in Turkey as opposed to Germany, and parts of it remind me of M. Night’s Praying With Anger. An old man visits a German prostitute, figures out she’s Turkish too and tells her, ‘Now I’m ashamed.’ He comes back with a proposal: he buys her out, she sleeps with him alone. Threatened by local Islamists, the woman accepts the offer, moves in and becomes more a wife than whore.

As the drunken man gropes her, she lashes back, he shoves her, and the act of violence sets in motion a continent-crossing plot whose intricacy reminds me of In Bruges. Several bonds must be broken or held in abeyance for this story to work, and Akin distracts you from the mechanics of the cutouts with the complex emotions of second genners.

Structurally this movie is far more ambitious than Head On, with stealth flash-forwards and visual puns relying on repetition in different contexts. This movie lacks the sense of danger, destruction and raw sexuality of Head On, whose female lead raised eyebrows when it was revealed she was a pr0n star. It is slower, more mature and more sensitive. It tackles EU politics. It’s more self-consciously arty, with an ending that tapers off and many things implied, not shown. And it is just mind-blowingly good.

In an early scene, a daughter tells a beautiful Turkish actress that she’s just returned to Hamburg after spending three months in India. Many scenes later, her grieving mother, driving through Istanbul’s Taksim Square, mentions her own time hitchhiking in India. ‘It was the thing to do at the time,’ she says. In its context, it resonates powerfully.

A scene:

The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret)

The Band’s Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret) is an absurdist gem about a ceremonial police band (the Iskanderia/Alexandria Musika Orkestra) getting lost in the Israeli desert and spending a night with ambivalent locals. Egyptians and Israelis reconciling is like Russians and Americans or Indians and Pakistanis — like Veer-Zara, trapdoors of tears and cheese. So the Israeli filmmaker focused on the personal. Politics figure only obliquely.

The thing no review will tell you is that this flick is absolutely saturated in sexuality. It’s not as stark as Y Tu Mamá También, but sexuality is the true subject of this film. A handsome young Egytian actor (objectify him here) and a beautiful Israeli cougar take an unwilling tumble, a backup booty call after three in the morning. The woman, played by the striking Ronit Elkabetz, tries to seduce the leader of the band, an older widower with pain in his pores. In the most affecting scene, she realizes she’s failed to woo him from his propriety. ‘We grew up watching Egyptian films. We were all in love with Omar Sharif. My life, an Egyptian movie,’ she tells him with a tear. The Bollyparallels are obvious; if ever in Ukraine, Raj Kapoor will get you laid. The Cairo film festival was so afraid of Israelis and Egyptians getting it on, it banned the movie. At the end, one column of Hebrew credits, another in Arabic, both read right to left.

As sexual aggressor, Elkabetz sways more than George Clooney, more than Angelina Jolie in Gone in 60 Seconds. Her Arab counterpart, the tall, handsome Saleh Bakri, gets in on one of the best sight gags in movie history. He’s tagged along with some young Israelis to a roller disco party, one of the few things to do in the town. One of his companions is a virginal young man oblivious to the ways of love, even though a teen girl’s sitting there sobbing for lack of attention. The camera frames the three kids: the girl, the virgin, and Bakri on the right, handing over a hankie and a mini liquor bottle while he instructs the virgin on hookup 101. In the background, Israeli’s catchy ‘nai nai nai’ song plays.

This movie was disqualified from the foreign-language Oscar race on the flimsy pretext that too much dialogue was in English. That is, of course, the main language the two parties had in common.

Here’s a gorgeous song by Reem Talhami which Elkabetz plays for the band leader:

Israel’s monster hit ‘nai nai nai’ song:

And here’s traditional Arab singer Umm Khaltoum, referred to in the movie, singing ‘Nazra.’

21

Going into this, know that 21 is just a terrible movie. It’s amateurish, hackneyed, predictable, felt like a first film. It’s shot on digital video, and the print I saw had muddy sound.

I thought I’d be more annoyed with the lack of Asians. They actually put Aaron Yoo and Liza Lapira in lots and lots of scenes. But they don’t get rid of ethnicity. I thought the point of swapping out the Asians was to whitewash the movie, but the Jim Sturgess’ lead character is identifiably British — maybe Irish, judging by his mother. Yeah, let’s swap out the Chinese kid for an Irish one. Everybody loves St. Paddy’s Day. It’s deracinated! It’s generic American!

Poor Yoo always plays the goofy, asexual sidekick to a handsome WASP, as in The Perfect Score. ‘Nice’ of ‘em to put in Jeff Ma, the real-life ringleader, for a cameo. On one hand Hollywood argues they need tentpole actors, Kevin Spacey here, to open a film. On the other, they don’t even cast Asians to star in their own stories. The Last Samurai was, need I remind you, a white man lecturing the emperor of Japan on traditional Japanese values.

It turns out that what they get the most wrong is not Asians, it’s engineers. Movies rarely get technical people right. Here they cast a guy who is the exact opposite of an engineer — hesitant, obviously not good with numbers despite the lines, very open to shades of gray. He’s a classic art student in look and manner, which worked in Across The Universe but is totally false here.

And then there’s the usual stupidity of someone who looks like Kate Bosworth going to school at MIT. It’s like Denise Richards playing a nuclear scientist with a stripper name.

Related post: Bringing down the Asians