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The Edge of Heaven
Directed and written by Fatih Akin
Starring Baki Davrak, Nurgul Yesilcay and Hanna Schygulla
Classification: 14A

In The Edge of Heaven, at the edge of heaven, everything converges but nothing connects. Not quite, at least, and it's that gap – the shadow cast between a desiring heart and hard reality – that gives this film both its gathering emotional momentum and, ultimately, its profound weight. Having proved in Head-On that he's a young director to watch, Fatih Akin makes a quantum leap here – already he's a mature director to admire. Born in Germany with Turkish ancestry, Akin is a one-man European Union whose work reflects his heritage, exploring the tensions and examining the fissures in culture's global clash.

Promoting that examination, this plot is so schematic it could double as a line graph, but what begins as an apparent liability ends as a clear strength. The lines all flow from an erotic starting point, the red-light district in Hamburg. There, Ali and his old but still-lusting body stroll past the windows exhibiting their wares, and stop to enjoy the ministrations of Yeter. Their conversation opens in German, switches to Turkish and continues through subsequent meetings that culminate in a negotiated domestic agreement. Moving into his apartment, labour agrees to put out, capital agrees to shell out – those looking for a political allegory won't be hard-pressed to find one.

Yet, here, the political is always organically rooted in the personal, and so the lines reach out further. The rather brutish Ali has a gentle son in Nejat (Baki Davrak), a professor of German literature at the city's university. Yeter has a daughter named Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay), who lives back in Istanbul and, unknown to her mother, has become a political activist wanted by the state. At this stage, the plot accelerates suddenly, melodramatically, generating a sequence of events (for your sake, I shouldn't be more specific) that leads to a kind of cultural exchange – Nejat travels back to his past in Turkey, from which Ayten escapes to hide out in Germany. There, by chance, she meets Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), a German student who, still living in her mother's house, offers the refugee sanctuary. The two women become lovers, as the mother (the great Hanna Schygulla) looks on with far more resignation than approval.

So there's the narrative geometry: three families, each of them internally fractured in different ways, and yet each tenuously linked to the others. As the plot develops further, and the setting alternates between the grey efficiency of Hamburg and the vibrant chaos of Istanbul, daughters get separated from mothers, sons from fathers, lovers from lovers. With these basic ties severed, either through deliberation or destiny, they all find themselves searching for surrogate bonds, reaching out across barriers of language and culture. Sometimes, their motive is practical – to escape persecution or poverty; sometimes, it's emotional – to allay loneliness; sometimes, it's moral – to help another; and sometimes it's a complex mix of the three.

Finally, though, what's important are not the motives but the results, which prove as torturous as the plot. Again, the forces of convergence draw these diverse people together and, within that tightening circle, they feel the need to connect. But the ability is a whole other matter, and a whole different battle, pitting them against not just the dictates of fate but also the often contrary reactions of their own personality.

Making all this even more intricate, the script toys with the time frame, executing Tarantino-esque loops that take us by surprise and, better still, neatly underscore the theme: past, present and future blurring across the generational divide. None of this is showy or pretentiously artsy. Instead, the structure of the movie quietly beds down with its substance, until the two become one, a perfect tangle of poignant allusions – or nearly perfect. The exception is a tendency to emphasize fate's role by overplaying coincidence, sequences that reduce the characters to ships-passing-in-the-night clichés.

Once more, you may choose to inflate the picture into a political allegory, focused on the truism that has Turkey eternally grappling with its own divided selves (East/West, modern/traditional; secular/fundamentalist). But I'd advise against it, mainly because Akin's sensitive direction, along with a matched set of gripping performances from the cast, ground the story so solidly in the foibles and hopes of our shared humanity – in, for instance, the sight of a parent finding the discarded sweater of a lost child, and burying her face in its lingering scent. And in the extraordinary last shot, held for long minutes over the credits, where a kind and far-travelled pilgrim sits patiently at the water's edge, waiting for hell to erode and heaven to judge.