Crossing: Odd Couple Road Movie Celebrates the Joys of Ambiguity
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Compassionate and original, Crossing is an odd couple road movie about friendship and acceptance of differences that demonstrates rather than preaches its theme.
The film, which won the Teddy Prize for best LGBTQ-themed in Berlin in February, follows Nia, a stern retired schoolteacher from the seaside town of Batumi, Georgia, who travels with a feckless 25-year-old man, Achi, across the Turkish border to Istanbul to find her estranged niece, a transgender sex worker.
Georgian-Swedish director Levan Akin (And Then We Danced) unfolds his parable of tolerance with unforced naturalism, keeping it rooted in contrasts of age, culture, nationality, education, and ethnicity.
At the story’s heart is Lia. Raised in Soviet-era Georgia, she is played by the formidable Georgian actor and composer Mzia Arabuli, as a woman on a late-life mission to do something meaningful. She sells family gold to finance the trip with the aim of fulfilling her late sister’s final wish to connect with her child, kicked out of the family home years before, heading to a strange city where, she says, “people go to disappear.”
The film begins not with Lia but with one of her former students Achi (Lukas Kankava), who is living unhappily with his ill-tempered stepbrother’s family. When Lia drops in looking for information about her niece, Tekla, the opportunistic Achi claims he knows her address in Istanbul, and he convinces her to let him travel with her. No alcohol and no narcotics, she informs him sternly, though that doesn’t stop her from frequently nipping at a bottle of the Georgian homemade whisky known as chacha.
On a ferry ride to Istanbul, the roaming handheld camera picks up the story of a third character, a recently graduated transgender human rights lawyer, Evrim (Deniz Dumanli). As we follow her, we learn she is working for the street people in brothels, beggars, and transgender sex workers who live in apartments together amid the city’s ubiquitous stray cats and a couple of orphan children (Bünyamin Değer and Sema Sultan Elekci) who pop in and out of various scenes as a kind of hopeful chorus.
At the end of a long day, Evrim even has time to start a romance with a pirate taxi driver, Omar (Ziya Sudancikmaz) who is working toward his teaching degree.
Meanwhile, Lia and Achi — whose frosty relationship has evolved into mutual tolerance — are making their own connections. They find noisy, temporary accommodations, and while Lia fitfully sleeps, Achi hits the streets, looking for work or fun, and soon finding a party to go to with a young woman from the hostel. Later, an older immigrant man hears Lia speaking Georgian and invites her to a dinner, where she drinks too much and lets her guard down.
One has a sense of the film’s structure as a kind of improvised dance, with the characters figuring out their steps as they go along, including, perhaps, the filmmaker himself. Crossing’s fanciful conclusion might leave viewers scratching their heads (real or imagined?) though it subtly echoes the movie’s overall theme of how our obsession with rigid categories can undermine the rich possibilities of ambiguity.
Crossing. Written and directed by Levan Akin. Starring Mzia Arabuli, Lucas Kankava, Deniz Dumanli, Ziya Sudancikmaz and Levan Bochorishvili. In theatres July 26 and streaming on MUBI from August 30.