Review: Crossing (2024)
In this beautiful Mubi release, a Georgian auntie and a restless teenager search across Istanbul for her niece, aided by a trans activist
Crossing (2024)
Written and directed by Levan Akin
In this slowly revealing film, a retired teacher goes on a quest to find her missing niece. Called Tekla, the niece is a transwoman who was driven from her family in Georgia (the Asian country) and, like every other queer person for centuries, fled to a city big enough to have room for everyone — in this case, Istanbul. The aunt, named Lia, is performing the dying request of her sister: to find this prodigal daughter and bring her home.
Her first stop is at Tekla’s last known Georgian address. There, a teenaged boy named Achi, eager to leave his scabby home sandwiched between a beach and a rail line, claims to have a forwarding address for the missing niece. Together the odd pair, the gruff 60-something aunt and the clueless 17-year-old Achi (Lucas Kankava), cross Turkey to Istanbul to search for Tekla.
So the film tells the story of a quest, and thus a journey. It doesn’t spend much time on the bus ride from one end of Turkey to the other; the pair are soon in Istanbul — a dirty, smoggy clog of shabby 100-year-old apartment buildings alternating with teeming street markets, restaurants, and cafes. From the point of view of the visitors — who don’t speak Turkish — it is about as comprehensible as the city depicted in “Blade Runner”: no center, no towers or landmarks except the Bosphorus, nothing clean or sorted. A street urchin of no more than nine years old, and his even younger girl companion, attach themselves to the pair for a while, then wander off. It takes Lia and Achi a full day of wandering to reach the address Achi saved in his phone, and when they get there, the place is indeed full of trans prostitutes, but they have never heard of Tekla.
But the scene is by no means a waste of time, because it’s the viewer’s first chance to see how the uncosmopolitan-but-no-one’s-fool Lia and Achi react to the reality of transwomen, each made up and be-wigged (or coiffed) but not dressed for the stage, rather in mumus. The women are neither friendly or unfriendly to the older woman and her awkward boy companion; once they settle on broken English as a lingua communi, they try to help the pair, but lacking information, they can’t. For her part, Lia is at first repelled by the trans girls, whom she also witnesses working the nearby streets. “What a life she chose for herself!” she says of Tekla. Achi, somehow understanding more about the outcasts than you’d expect, counters “I don’t think she had much of a choice at all.”
Then we meet an unrelated third character, a woman about 30 named Evrim (Deniz Dumanli). Having witnessed the previous scene with the sex workers, the viewer will have little trouble recognizing that Evrim is also a transwoman. Having just gotten a law degree but still without a license to practice law, she is working as a sort of community organizer.
For the second act, the movie alternates between scenes featuring Lia and Achi (or each separately) either on the search or trying to find something to eat that they can afford, and then Evrim. She goes to the police to seek the release of a pickpocket who is the child of one of her clients; this turns out to be the same street urchin (Nino Tedoradze) who attached himself to Lia and Achi days before. Evrim herself turns out to be the “social worker” to whom the first household of sex workers referred them. Once they meet Evrim, finding Tekla suddenly seems possible.
I liked so much about this film. It’s beautiful though it has hardly a moment or prettiness. The mise-en-scene is almost unrelievedly sketch and louche — only once do we see a restaurant that actually looks nice — and I admired the director’s commitment to this vision. The actress who plays the aunt, Mzia Arabuli, is fantastic: gruff and wary all the time, with a glinting eye that observes everything, and only occasionally permitting herself to show a little compassion to the aimless Achi. Deniz Dumanli, in her first film role, glitters as Evrim.
“Crossing” is in art house theaters now, distributed by Mubi. If I’m reading their website right, the film will become available for streaming on the Mubi channel on August 30.