Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay, right) is confronted by Susanne (Hanna Schygulla), a German woman who has suffered a terrible loss, brought about partly by Ayten’s actions.

Strand Releasing

There are six principal characters in The Edge of Heaven: two mothers, two daughters, a father and a son, all arranged in more or less symmetrical pairs. In the course of this extraordinary film by the German writer-director Fatih Akin (which won the best screenplay award in Cannes last year) children are lost, lost parents are never found, and generational and geographical distances grow wider.

Yet at the same time, as the lives of the characters cross and entwine, there is a sense of human connections becoming stronger and thicker, of a fragile moral order coalescing beneath the randomness and cruelty of modern life. And even as the movie bristles with violence — accidental and systematic, sexual and political — its tone is curiously gentle.

At the beginning, Yeter (Nursel Kose), a Turkish woman who works as a prostitute in Bremen, Germany, is confronted by two menacing enforcers of Islamic morality, who demand that she renounce her sinful ways. “I repent,” she says through gritted teeth, and though her words are more a rebuke than an apology, they establish one of Akin’s themes. Toward the end of the film, Yeter’s daughter, Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay), is confronted by Susanne (Hanna Schygulla), a German woman (the mother of Ayten’s lover, Lotte) who has suffered a terrible loss, brought about partly by Ayten’s actions. Speaking no German, Ayten tries to express her overwhelming remorse in rudimentary English. “Forgiven” is the only word she can find, as if she is offering absolution instead of asking for it.

That compassion does not always come easily or express itself clearly is one of Akin’s central insights. He is generous with his characters, even at their worst, but he also regards them with a measure of detachment as their good intentions go astray and their bad impulses bear terrible fruit. Similarly, while he is acutely aware of viciousness, injustice and hypocrisy in both Turkey (where his parents were born) and his native Germany, his camera absorbs the authentic beauty in both countries, from tidy Bremen to pulsing Istanbul to the tea-covered hillsides and fishing villages of the Black Sea coast.

The Edge of Heaven is firmly rooted in these places, manifesting a local knowledge that quietly demolishes received ideas about East and West. Nejat (Baki Davrak), whose father, Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), emigrated from Turkey, is a professor of German literature, giving lectures on Goethe to sleepy college students. He is presented not as a symbol of assimilation or displacement, but as a person more or less comfortable with himself. The same cannot be said for Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska). Her mix of childish impulsiveness and half-baked idealism puts her at odds with her mother, Susanne, a former hippie whose accommodation to respectable middle-class life drives Lotte crazy.

Lotte is immediately smitten with Ayten, who has fled to Germany to escape the Turkish police. It is not hard to see why. The prospect of helping a radical fugitive from an exotic country appeals to Lotte’s sense of political drama, to be sure, but Yesilcay’s charisma transcends ideology. With her high, wide-set cheekbones and prizefighter’s hunch, Ayten has a sexual magnetism that is both glamorous and predatory. Of course Lotte risks everything — her mother’s love, her safety, her life — to help Ayten. Who wouldn’t?

If I resist saying much more about what happens in The Edge of Heaven, it’s not for fear of giving anything away. Akin provides his own spoilers in the form of chapter titles that announce the deaths of certain characters before we have even met them. Rather than dissipate the suspense, though, these disclosures intensify it by adding an element of dread. And the shape of the narrative, a mutation of the now-pervasive Babel model of braided, chronologically de-centered storytelling, allows for plenty of surprises and revelations.

But the main revelation is the film itself. Akin’s previous fictional feature, Head-On, was a tour de force, driven by rage and sexual desire, that traveled over similar cultural and geographical terrain at ferocious velocity. The Edge of Heaven has a wider scope and a more contemplative, deliberate mood. And if it doesn’t match the brutal impact of Head-On, it has a cumulative power, both intellectual and emotional, of its own. By the end you know the characters so well that you can’t believe you’ve seen the movie only once. Yet on a second viewing, it seems completely new. And that may be because the world they inhabit is immediately recognizable — until we get to heaven, it’s where we live — and like no place you’ve been before.

****The Edge of Heaven

Starring: Baki Davrak, Nursel Kose, Hanna Schygulla, Tuncel Kurtiz, Nurgul Yesilcay, Patrycia Ziolkowska. In English, German and Turkish, with English subtitles.

Rated: Not rated, contains adult themes.