Rating:

There are so many big things going on in Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven - love, death, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, even some taut political thriller stuff - that it's easy to imagine the film imploding from the stress of it all.

It doesn't, though. In fact, the movie is near-perfect, suspenseful, heart-breaking, profound. Akin, a German director of Turkish descent whose 2005 feature, Head-On, offered a surprising, exhilarating cross-cultural love story, returns to the themes of conflict and coexistence - Turks in Germany, trying to assimilate, hanging on to social and religious moorings; and Germans in Turkey, likewise looking to find their way in a different world.

But The Edge of Heaven succeeds not because of its bigness, but because Akin takes us straight and deep into the characters. Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz) is a retired widower from Turkey who has long lived in Germany, where his son, Nejat (Baki Davrak), has grown up, and where he is now a professor at a German university. The old man, Ali, is a drinker, a gambler, a guy who cooks and grows tomatoes in his back garden. On a ramble through Bremen's red light district, he meets up with Yeter (Nursdel Kose), a prostitute who herself hails from Turkey. Ali makes Yeter a proposition: Come live with me, and I will pay you what you earn here in this brothel.

Akin has structured The Edge of Heaven in chapters, in a circular, time-skewing way, and he has given each chapter a title. I won't give them away here, but they alert the viewer to significant events to befall certain characters. But knowing what's to come doesn't diffuse the drama, or the emotional jolt. In some uncanny way, the title cards make the outcome more devastating.

Yeter has a daughter back in Istanbul: Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay), a 27-year-old student radical. Mother and daughter have lost touch. The daughter comes to Germany to look for Yeter, and is befriended by Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), a student who offers the broke and homeless Ayten a room. The young women become lovers. Lotte's mother - played by the remarkable Hanna Schygulla - looks on, worried and angry, as her daughter falls for this brooding foreigner.

What Akin does in The Edge of Heaven - jockeying time, moving people into close proximity of one another, raising questions about chance and destiny - reminded me of the late, great Polish filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski. Akin has a similar eye for detail, and a similarly dark, ironic view of humankind, but one nonetheless tinged with hope and romanticism.

Beautifully shot, with performances that are finely turned and utterly compelling, The Edge of Heaven is not to be missed.

The Edge of Heaven ***1/2 (out of four stars)

Directed by Fatih Akin. With Baki Davrak, Nursel Kose, Tuncel Kurtiz, Hanna Schygulla, Nurgil Yesilcay and Patrycia Ziolkowska. Distributed by Strand Releasing. In German, Turkish and English, with subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 56 mins.

Parent's guide: No MPAA rating (sex, nudity, violence, profanity, adult themes)

Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse

at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online," at http://go.philly.com/onmovies.