NYLON - May 2008 - (Page 111) FILM STRIPS EDITED BY LUKE CRISELL T H E E D G E O F H E AV E N Winner of the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes, Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven is structured as three interconnected stories: In the first two, titles announce a character’s impending death; the third reveals the unlikely ties that can come from tragedy. In “The Death of Yeter,” a Turkish widower opens his home to a prostitute only to kill her in a drunken fight. His son Nejat decides to find her estranged daughter, Ayten, a revolutionary still living in Turkey. In “The Death of Lotte,” Ayten flees Turkey for Germany, where she falls for Lotte, but is soon arrested and deported. Lotte follows her back to Istanbul, an impetuous move her mother, Susanne, (Fassbinder muse Hanna Schygulla) condemns, for good reason. Part Three, “The Edge of Heaven,” brings Susanne to Istanbul, and into Nejat’s life. Throughout the film there is a revolving door between Germany and Turkey, as characters make the journey both ways (alive and dead). It’s an apt metaphor given the two countries’ relations since WWII. Part one is a little weak; its scenes feel mechanical and Akin’s agenda is cloying. But in part two the schematics take a back seat and, when all three parts begin to overlap in time, revealing the intricacies of the narrative, the film unveils the full scale of its poignancy. MIKE HARVKEY How confident were you that you would find bin Laden? You think, “I have as good a chance as anybody, so why not?” Somebody wins the lottery every day. You go through some incredibly dangerous territory in the film. You must have thought there was a chance you wouldn’t make it back in one piece. You can’t ignore the fact that you’re going into places where Americans are targets—targets for murder, for kidnapping, for ransom—but we tried to be as safe as we could. And even if it’s bad, you think, “What are we going to do next?” Not “What if we don’t make it?” What’s the best shot you didn’t get? We were walking through the streets in Jordan, and there was a little boy, maybe eight or nine, holding a butcher knife, staring me down like I’m the devil. I was like, “God, I wish we could have captured that.” And when we were shooting on the West Bank there was a guy who went to get his machete, but the way it’s shot you can’t tell what’s going on. How hard was it to go into the tribal areas of Pakistan? About a week before we were there, there was an attack on a madrasa in the tribal area, where 80 people were killed, and all the people said it was a U.S. plane that had done it. The anti-Western sentiment was beyond belief. The Pakistani journalists were like, “Even we’re not going there.” How will being a dad affect your future shoots? My wife’s already saying I’m not allowed to make a movie like this again. Care to declare your vote for this year’s presidential election? I like Obama, I like Hillary, I even liked McCain until he started talking about how there were going to be even more wars—it’s like, can we finish these first? It’s important for whoever’s in the White House to change our foreign policy. We need to be sending more overseas than just armies. Q&A: MORGAN SPURLOCK Super Size Me director Morgan Spurlock sets off to find the world’s most wanted man in Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?—tracking the terror mastermind from an ultra-orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem (where Spurlock is pummeled by locals) to a U.S. military camp in Afghanistan to the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan, where most experts assume bin Laden is. Diane Vadino talks to Spurlock, now home in Brooklyn, about knife-wielding kids, family responsibilities, and his choice for our next president. THE CHILDREN OF HUANG SHI Although the epigram of The Children of Huang Shi, which features the real-life titular youngsters, now in their eighties, speaking of the man, George Hogg, who once bravely brought them across a war-torn land to freedom, dilutes things somewhat, what comes before it makes this movie worth watching. Jonathan Rhys Meyers stars as Hogg, a privileged Oxford graduate who, before settling down as a banker, embarked on a roundthe-world excursion of self-discovery. Arriving in Shanghai in 1937, just as the Japanese mount an invasion, Hogg finds himself the reluctant caretaker of 60 orphaned, unruly boys. With the help of a Chinese partisan group leader (Chow Yun-Fat) and an Australian makeshift nurse (Radha Mitchell), Hogg fights the war within the war, guiding these urchins on an ambitious 700mile slog through winter-sieged mountain ranges ahead of the advancing Japanese army. Since the first articles about Hogg appeared 22 years ago, Hollywood execs have been desperate to bring his story to the screen. In the hands of veteran Roger Spottiswoode (Tomorrow Never Dies), Hogg’s larger-than-life journey elicits shades of Casablanca as the misfits trudge through a world of danger, intrigue, and the selflessness that marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship. REBECCA RODRIGUEZ SAVAGE GRACE When Tony Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite plastics fortune, stabbed his mother, Barbara Daly Baekeland, to death in a posh London flat in 1972, it was the final chapter in a family saga worthy of Tennessee Williams (or Sophocles). For one, there was Tony’s homosexuality, which his mother tried to cure by seducing him. Then, when Tony finally brought home a girl, his father ran off with her. Starring Julianne Moore as the charismatic, obsessively social-climbing matriarch (a role that seems almost too expected of this most fearless of actresses to be truly unsettling), Savage Grace, directed by Tom Kalin and based on the award-winning book by Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson, leans heavily on its gifted actors—including Stephen Dillane as the archly snobbish Brooks and a wonderfully subtle Eddie Redmayne as the schizophrenic, faun-like Tony—as well as sunlit depictions of wealthy bohemia at play. Only in fleeting moments does this highbrow camp-fest locate a much-needed self-awareness, such as when Tony quotes his entrepreneurial grandfather: “Money allows you to not have to live with the consequences of your mistakes.” A postscript later informs us that Tony killed himself at Rikers in 1981, at the age of 35. MEGAN O’GRADY flight of the red balloon With this quietly beautiful film, Chinese director Hou Hsiao Hsien (Café Lumière) sets his trademark long takes and unscripted dialogue outside Asia. Unfolding in Paris, Flight of the Red Balloon is less a story than it is an exploration of characters: Suzanne (Juliette Binoche), a mother drowning under stress; her son, Simon (Simon Iteanu), left virtually parentless; and his babysitter, Song (Song Fang), a Taiwanese film student. Each actor makes admirable contributions, but Binoche is masterful. The film is improved through magical realism inspired by Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 masterpiece, Le Ballon rouge, in which an impish balloon befriends a Parisian boy. Hsien distinguishes his homage from the first moments: the camera pans up a lamppost (exactly how Lamorisse introduced his balloon) but reveals only the red lampshade; then it continues into tree branches… And there it is. That playfulness lightens the movie as the balloon follows Simon home, hovering outside his window. When the balloon is alluded to subtly, it’s effective (a red stoplight reflected in glass), but when it literally intrudes it’s a distraction compounded by self-consciously drifting camerawork that makes the viewer feel like another balloon floating outside a window, peering in. This is a barrier to emotional connection, and the unconventional structure precludes a truly moving ending, but this movie is after something else: It draws you into an intensity of observation all too scarce in today’s harried life—and for that it’s rare and wonderful. JOSH WEIL
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