Hal Kitchen
A short time ago I listed And Then We Danced, Swedish/Georgian director Levin Akin’s breakthrough drama, on a list of films made by their endings. It was an exaggeration in that film’s case as there’s a lot to commend about that poignant and nuanced character drama beyond its show-stopping last scene, but nothing looms as large as young protagonist Merab’s last careless dance of freedom. Crossing, Akin’s latest film, never reaches that kind of height, but it does benefit from a strong, curious eye, some excellent performances, and a touching story of guilt and the search for freedom.
We begin with Achi (Lucas Kankava), a clueless overgrown adolescent living on his brutish half-brother’s couch who sees his chance to escape his dead-end life when his old history teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) shows up at his door. She’s searching for Tekla, the grown-up niece her sister disowned when she came out as a woman. Tekla is long gone, she crossed the border to Turkey bound for Istanbul months ago, and eager to follow suit, Achi hitches his wagon to Lia with a promise to help find her. Lia has little time for the feckless Achi’s questions, her sole concern is with making good on a promise to a dying sister and seeking forgiveness from the niece she failed to love as an aunt should.
As the two take the ferry into Istanbul, a beautiful sequence begins where Akin’s camera begins to wander throughout the ship, eventually alighting upon Evrim (Deniz Dumanli) a trans human rights lawyer working with an NGO to assist those in need and we begin to follow her about her days and nights, alternating back and forth between Evrim and Lia/Achi through a series of near misses. We intuit that Evrim may be exactly the person to help Lia find her niece, but in the busy urban sprawl it takes a while for them to make a connection.
The trusty road-movie setup with a crotchety, careworn middle aged traditionalist and a dimwitted but good-natured young sidekick gives the film some legs as far as market appeal goes and might allow it to escape the niche arthouse-LGBTQ crowd, but it does hamstring the film a little as far as its drama goes. It keeps things feeling light and superficial, bound into narrative tropes that keep it on rails. It pulls not one but two “save the cat” moments, where a character shows their tender spirit by pausing to pet a stray feline. But still though, Akin does manage to pull off some surprises. It’s an unexpectedly long time before the central trio are united and once they are, it still shrinks from facile resolutions. The movie dangles a moment of closure, provides some catharsis, and then slopes away into a more challenging, ambivalent denouement.
The true heart of the film lies in Lia’s growth. She is not, at first, comfortable with her mission nor does she fully understand her own motives in dropping everything and coming to another country to find a woman she knows nothing about. She’s brittle and entitled too, and her interactions with the men and women of Istanbul stir longing and resentment in her own misspent life, which perhaps she can lay to rest if she finds someone to nurture, someone she owes an aunt. She says that to her:
“It seems Istanbul is a place people come to disappear”
But the more we see, the more we learn she has it backwards. Istanbul is a place people come not to hide but to reveal their true selves.
That central motif of “crossing” also plays out in a number of different ways. Of course “Trans” means “across”—from one gender to another—as cis means “same”. And of course there are the national and cultural barriers between rural Georgia and urban Turkey. When they first cross the border from Georgia into Turkey, Achi is disappointed not to immediately feel different stepping through to the other side. Crossing is less concerned with these social or institutional barriers and more with the ones we carry around with us. Some of the most electrifying and stimulating moments occur when we are made aware of these bubbles, the private worlds we each carry around with us, when strangers intrude on them and make a connection, and when they do not. When in a city of millions, two pairs of Georgian expats sit back to back at dinner, and a shared cigarette leads to an evening-long friendship and possible romance, or when one character walks straight past the person they’re seeking, to lost in their own sadness to recognize them. For more than an hour Evrim and Lia keep circling one another without quite crossing into one another’s lives.
The protagonists of Crossing are from different worlds, but the film does thankfully hold back from plying the audience with facile indicators of that fact. It’s immediately obvious how different Evrim and Lia are from one another, how their lives have schooled them in completely different ways. Lia was once a schoolteacher, but we see that she has little strength left for nurturing anyone, not even herself. Meanwhile, Evrim moves tirelessly, mentoring homeless children, providing legal support for other local queer people, dragging herself around hospitals getting approval for her new ID and searching for a man who would be proud to be seen with her publicly. Every minute of the day is a Sisyphean climb towards the life she, and those around her, ought to have. Both characters are their own cliche in a way, but through the artful performances of both women, their characters feel real. Arabuli in particular carries the film with her quiet composure and exquisite sadness. Every close up on her face reveals more than any line of her dialogue, and Dumanli’s presence is a bright contrast to her contained pensive air. That’s not to say that Akin’s writing doesn’t contribute some lovely moments, but as with And Then We Danced, his films come most alive with the moment of his camera, weaving among its characters.
Though not a modern classic—it’s too bound by convention for that—Crossing does manage to leave an enduring impression thanks to its quiet poignancy and the emotional openness of its performers. As a portrait of its characters, much of the heavy lifting is done by the cast, but Akin’s grasp of melancholic tone and willingness to experiment with story show a curiosity that is extremely becoming and occasionally extremely rewarding.
