Film
Heaven Sent
by Helene Wong
Stories of death that are an affirmation of life.
In the full-on Head-On, Turkish--German film-maker Fatih Akin gave the impression his style was hot-blooded energy, violence and grit. His tale of two rebels won Berlin’s Golden Bear and brought him to notice as an artist with something to say beyond the film’s designed-to-jolt surface. The Edge of Heaven, seen in last year’s New Zealand International Film Festivals and now deservedly returning on general release, couldn’t be more different in style, yet the themes are still profound. Indeed, Akin has said these two films are part of a trilogy on love, death and evil, which is unquestionably thematically ambitious.
But if Heaven is about death, it’s ultimately affirming of life. In it, death tears people apart, but also brings them together, giving birth to new connections and reconnections. In keeping with that optimism, Akin’s treatment is calm and mature, allowing meaning to emerge rather than confront, and letting the camera rest rather than race.
It’s also an astonishingly fluid treatment, given the complex interweaving of the plot and characters. This complexity is more apparent than real, but one gets so lost – in a good way – in the thread of the narrative, the changing locales and succession of unique characters that it seems a much bigger story. Describing it becomes a very slippery exercise. Let’s just say it has six main characters, some Turkish, some German, ranging from prostitute to professor, but it’s their roles as parents and children that become the film’s real concern. For reasons more -significant than shopping or sightseeing, they all cross into each other’s countries and their degrees of separation become lessened as a result.
Stories about apparently random human connections (Crash, Babel) have become fashionable and can have problems with credibility and a mechanistic feel. Heaven never seems that tidy, perhaps because of its peripatetic quality and because its coincidences are outweighed by the lack of coincidences: we, the observers, see the possibilities, but the protagonists themselves don’t. At the end, there is the prospect that everything could be tied up – later, off-screen – with a bow, but Akin has opted for keeping it a mere possibility, which is more credible and somehow more delicious.
The cast is wonderful. Aside from the great Hanna Schygulla, whose graceful presence and detailed characterisation is a joy to watch, they are all unfamiliar faces, but their talent, regardless of age or experience, gives us memorable characters of intensity and specificity.
Shot in Hamburg, Bremen, Istanbul and Trabzon, the film also takes us into the specific worlds of the characters – not the tourist haunts and views, but the backstreets and the ordinary daily lives of their inhabitants. They might be backdrops to the action, yet the camera lingers- on them long enough to enable us to really look at them, the way the characters do, with the eyes of new-comers or returnees to familiar territory. Once again, it feels like an affirmation of life.
Akin applies economy of storytelling and subtextual triggering of emotions to explore themes of migration, politics, -forgiveness and family. He creates a prism of relationships through which to view the profound questions of being human. The last part of his proposed trilogy will be much anticipated.
The name Allan Wilson doesn’t sound like someone famous; more like the name of the third kid from the left in the back row of a school photo. But somehow that’s the point in George Andrews’ documentary Allan Wilson: -Evolutionary – Kiwi kids can grow up to do great things.
Wilson, a Pukekohe boy, went from King’s College to Berkeley via Otago, becoming a leading scientist in the field of evolution. His team discovered mitochondrial DNA. Andrews smoothly and efficiently combines interviews, accessible graphics, anecdotes and even throwaway comments to give not only an understanding of the science, but – and this is what marks this documentary out – an often shrewd insight into the man himself: the quintessential pioneering expat Kiwi individualist. The film is having a limited run in the four main centres, and it’s well worth seeking out and sparing 40 minutes to catch it.
