Reviews

Film

The Edge of Heaven

Directed by Fatih Akin, starring Baki Davrak, Nursel Kose, Nurgul Yesilcay, Patrycia Ziolkowska, Hanna Schygulla, Tuncel Kurtiz

Coincidences in so-called real life fascinate us. We collect and happily share them as they make life seem less random. We are, however, deeply suspicious of coincidences in fiction and drama, despite their recurrence in the literature of the past from Sophocles through Shakespeare to Dickens. We feel that those who create stories, rather than living them, should not cheapen serious work with such melodramatic contrivances. This particular charge has been brought against the admirable The Edge of Heaven (aka Auf Der Anderen Seite), the new film by Fatih Akin, the 34-year-old German director born in Hamburg of Turkish parents.

The fact that it was awarded the prize for the best screenplay at Cannes by a jury that included such great storytellers as Stephen Frears, Abderrahmane Sissako and Orhan Pamuk suggests that, fortunately, this view is not universally shared.

The movie opens with Ali Aksu, an elderly Turkish widower in Bremen, going as a client to a 40-something prostitute in the city's red light district. Discovering she's Turkish and called Yeter, he invites her to come and live with him. His offer is frank, if not entirely honorable, and after two young Turkish zealots have made dangerous threats unless she repents, she moves in with the old man. Meanwhile his son, Nejat, a professor of German literature at Hamburg, meets Yeter, and is won over both by her honesty and by the fact that she's working as a whore so her daughter back in Turkey can study economics and find a better life. But suddenly this seemingly happy arrangement goes wrong. When Yeter attempts to establish her independence, the old man accidentally kills her in a drunken rage, and goes to jail.

A powerful story in itself, this is only the first act. The son is so overcome by shame that he takes the whore's body back for burial in Istanbul and tries to locate her daughter to pay for her education. He can't find her but stays in the city, taking over a German bookshop from its German owner. Meanwhile the daughter, Ayten, a left-wing political activist, dedicated and manipulative, is on the run from the police. With a false passport she heads to Germany in search of her mother, whom she believes is working in a shoe shop. In Hamburg she meets a kindly German student, Lotte, and they become lovers.

If you dislike The Edge of Heaven you could sneer at the use of coincidence. If you think well of it, you will accept it as a carefully patterned narrative of parallels, echoes and fateful encounters that reflect on the relationships between father and son, mother and daughter, on the themes of duty, obligation, sacrifice and redemption, and above all on the nature of family, exile, roots and national identity. The Guardian

TV

Little Fugui the Magic Chef

The Children's Channel with CCTV usually airs imported animations at the 7 pm prime time slot. Recently, the home-made Little Fugui the Magic Chef has caught much attention.

Set in the early 1900s when the Empress Dowager had to flee the capital when the invading troops of eight Western powers captured Beijing, the cartoon evolves around a teenage chef, who aspires to cook the best dishes to save his grandpa.

With a huge group of artists and novelist Yu Hua as the consultant, the 132-episode cartoon gives humane portrayals of historical figures such as Emperor Guangxu and Li Lianying the eunuch.

Best of all, Little Fugui must create a new dish against all the odds with each episode. Though they may not be faithful in terms of real cooking methods, the cartoon succeeds in enticing people to Chinese cuisine. Liu Jun

(China Daily 03/04/2008 page20)