Melissa Benn

Last night I watched an amazing film, The Edge of Heaven, a Turkish German co-production about six characters in contemporary Europe, several of them first and second generation immigrants, whose lives become entangled and whose fates mirror each other in various clever, poignant ways.

There are some unbearably sad moments: a mother and daughter, both searching for each other, pass on a motorway; one, in a bus, the other in a car ( going in different directions.) We know that the mother is soon to die and that the daughter will never find her………..ever. ( At this point, I started to shout at the TV set like a child at a pantomime: “She’s in the bus, she’s in the car!” etc)

Characters fleetingly pass each other, unaware, unlike the audience, of their relationship: a device so common in so many modern films, such as Babel, and TV productions, that try to depict global connection and chaos simultaneously.

A university professor lectures to a half empty hall while a young woman sleeps, obviously utterly exhausted, right at the back; later in the film, the academic tries to find this same woman. Two of the main characters briefly coincide, at immigration. One is being deported from Turkey, for having accidentally killed his prostitute lover; the other is arriving in Turkey, looking for her lost daughter. Neither knows the other, but we know their relationship to each other.

The Edge of Heaven tackles modern life in a rather beautiful glancing way. There’s no great song or dance about fundamentalist Islam, just a low key but rather terrifying scene in which an ageing prostitute is quietly threatened on the top of a bus by two men who tell her she is betraying the religion of her homeland ( they are all Turks and Muslims, living in Germany.) 



The film’s title has multiple meanings, including the constant nearness of death. Its original title in German was Auf der Anderen Seite: On the Other Side. But both new and old title still refer to both mortality and the imminent entry by Turkey to the European Union.

It’s a story of sadness, ageing, loss, love and the constant, frenetic movement of peoples within contemporary Europe. But it’s also about the kindness of strangers in this hostile, fast moving world. A simple gesture – the offer of a meal, a place to stay, a willingness to listen, with genuine interest and humility, to the story of another human being – can be truly transformative. The saving grace of a cruel world.

Over the past forty eight hours, I have watched two glossy, high end Hollywood ‘womens pictures’ : All about Eve, starring Bette Davis and Anne Baxter, made in 1950; the other a 2008 remake of George Cukor’s classic The Women, starring Hollywood royalty of a certain age, including Annette Bening, Meg Ryan, Debra Messing,Candice Bergen, Jada Pinkett Smith.

Both films are about love, betrayal, womens’ friendship and professional ambition but one is a classic and the other ……..well, it just doesn’t quite work. All about Eve, made in 1950, remains an absorbing, ironic study of the relationship between women of different generations, with Davis playing a possibly exaggerated version of the public’s perception of her: the tough but tender thesp. Anne Baxter is truly chilling as a conniving ingenue who tries to steal everything Davis possesses, from husband to professional reputation, but succeeds in winning fame, but not real love. Baxter’s performance still stands as a seminal portrait of a peculiarly modern form of acceptable evil; the person who will sacrifice all integrity for success, while appearing saccharine sweet on the outside.

In contrast, The Women, a comedy about a group of women discovering a friend’s husband’s infidelity in a ‘powder room’ , while perfectly watchable, has no centre, no real drive. I’m trying to figure out why. Today’s middle aged Hollywood actresses look twenty five from a distance yet oddly rubbery close up, so a lot of screen time is taken up internally managing that double take. The script isn’t that sharp either. Maybe it’s because it has too gloopy an ending: lead character finds professional success, wins back errant husband. Here it lacks the realist edge of All about Eve which makes it perfectly clear: high end professionalism, while utterly worthwhile in itself, carries a high price for women. Then and now.

But I think the problem is something to do with the difference in post war and contemporary emotional tone/registers. Women, including Hollywood women, of a previous age, were much more self contained, a stoicism that, paradoxically, made their sadness and struggles more moving. We associate Meg Ryan, Annette Bening and Bette Midler with many things, but stoicism is not one of them; their high octane zaniness too often hits an off tune note for a re-make of a film about a woman’s strategic management of her husband’s infidelity. We also can’t help but be aware that these are all highly powerful women within the industry; it’s hard to see them as mere wise cracking adjutants to the all powerful man (who never appears, incidentally.)

For these reasons, perhaps, one of the best things in the film, apart from Debra Messing giving birth, is Cloris Leachman (whom I best remember as a heartbreakingly lonely widow in The Last Picture Show) playing a bemused housekeeper of eighty something, who can’t admit she is emotionally involved with her employer. Slowly but surely, Leachman, less culturally visible than Ryan and co, really does emerge from the screen as a three dimensional character, a woman of no worldly power but real depth.