In Levan Akin’s fascinating drama, two strangers connect in Istanbul.
“Crossing,” by Levan Akin, is a marvelous travelogue about two Georgian strangers who team up for a trip to Turkey where neither speaks the language nor knows how to get around.
Lia (Mzia Arabuli) is a retired history teacher; Achi (Lucas Kankava) a young fast-talker who barely seems to have gone to school at all, although he’s picked up a bit of English on YouTube. Achi has made the trek to find his mother, while Lia is looking for her estranged niece, a trans woman. In a city of 15 million, the odds are against them.
“Istanbul is a place where people come to disappear,” Lia sighs. (Arabuli, with her hawkish cheekbones and disappointed mouth, has one of the best screen faces of the summer.) The unlikely companions instead encounter a balladeering street urchin (Bunyamin Deger) with an extraordinary voice, and a 30-something trans social worker (Deniz Demanli) who impressively scales the calf-crippling hills in a pair of heavy heels. Sounds cutesy, but Akin keeps his mood piece feeling natural and breezy, allowing only a few camera flourishes on his own quest for tiny moments of connection, including a nod of recognition between Lia and one of the city’s famous street cats, two wanderers wiling away an afternoon.
The setting is half the story, although the cinematographer Lisabi Fridell avoids anything you’d see on a postcard. One image worth pinning to the fridge is a tilt up a teetering apartment exterior where almost all the windows have a head poking out.
In this town, in this movie, you feel absolutely certain each face has its own fascinating story to tell.
Crossing
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
