Seret Turki

One more word about "The Edge of Heaven". I happen to be a mild film weeper. I don't literally sob in a way that causes people to hush me and call in the ushers, but a truly powerful scene may silently wet my cheek.

"The edge of heaven" is the first film that ever caused me to shed a tear the following day. I was thinking back to a scene in which the viewer "spends a night" in a hotel room with Hanna Schygulla. She is a German mother who just arrived in Istanbul, where her daughter was murdered. Her last words on the phone to her prodigal offspring, one month previously, were: "from now on your on your own, work it out."

The mother's night of mourning at the hotel begins with tossing and turning on the bedcovers and ends with tearing at the blinds in interminable moans. The entire proccess, cut into five short shots, is filmed from an indifferent point in the ceiling, as if through a security camera. Schygulla's charecter is so reserved throughout the rest of the film, and even through much of this scene, that her outbreak is difficult to watch. In Israeli slang the term "Turkish movie" is used to imply "tearjerker". Oddly, it is this delicate treatment of a charecter that solidifies the stereotype.