Crossing opens with a title card stating that Georgian and Turkish are gender-neutral languages, with grammar not containing gender-oriented articles. We then are introduced to retired teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli), as she visits a former student living in a shack on the beach with his family, trying to find out where her niece that once lived there has moved to. Her niece, as it turns out, is a transgender girl named Tekla whose parents disowned her, and that opening factoid starts to acquire the taste of a fortune cookie.
Levan Akin’s third feature, And Then We Danced (2019), was the breakout moment for this Swedish filmmaker of Georgian descent. The story of two gay Georgian dancers who gradually develop feelings for each other despite the country’s intense homophobia was the Swedish submission to the Oscars in the International Film category, inspired protests and counter-protests when it screened in Georgia, and remains popular and highly rated on Letterboxd as of this writing. Despite all this, it isn’t actually much of a movie, and one would probably struggle to find a devoted fan who could say something interesting about its one-note protagonist and generic coming-out arc. Akin’s filmmaking frequently consisted of shooting Georgian dance from the waist up in shallow-focus closeups with drab lighting: whether this was to allow their facial expressions to tell us what we’re supposed to be feeling, or because the actors weren’t actual dancers and he needed to hide it, is left as an exercise for the viewer.
Unfortunately, the director’s writing and filmmaking haven’t much improved in Crossing, which sends Lia and unhappy shack resident Achi (Lucas Kankava) off to Istanbul when Lia hears that Tekla crossed the border into Turkey and Achi begs to come with her. (The fact that he’s fleeing an abusive family doesn’t ever seem to register, since he has very few issues settling in Istanbul.) If you’ve seen one movie about a tough old lady bonding with a younger boy, you’ve probably seen them all, and Crossing is closer to the audience-pleasing clichés of Central Station than the unhinged parody of Erick Zonca’s underseen Julia. Akin mostly just makes two separate countries look dingy and generic thanks to the film looking just like And Then We Danced’s dance sequences, with whichever actor is speaking situated in the center of the frame. Basic shot-reverse shot setups are constantly wobbling due to excessive use of handheld camera. One Steadicam shot on a ferry seems to be aiming to capture all the humanity of Istanbul on a boat, but you need more than just a child singing and playing guitar at its end to seem genuinely interested in the variety of people in this world.
We are introduced to a separate strand of the film focused on the transgender woman lawyer Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), who will eventually try to help Lia and Achi in their search for Tekla when they meet 25 minutes before the film ends. Since there are not too many films about Turkish transgender lawyers, and a shot of her filling out paperwork has a fun improvisational quality thanks to one of Istanbul’s stray cats, it initially seems like she’ll provide some fresh energy. But then we return to Lia and Achi’s quest. They eventually try falling asleep in a lousy hotel after some conversation, and you can probably guess what color the room’s lighting is, as well as what they hear from next door as they try and fall asleep.
Evrim eventually does receive more solo scenes, albeit drastically outnumbered by Lia and Achi’s tourism. While her life in Istanbul is a bit more interesting to follow, romantic issues, bureaucratic obstacles in trying to get a new ID, and a social circle of trans sex workers are not exactly fresh perspectives on the trans experience. The only real surprise is that it takes so long for Akin to throw in the inevitable scene of cartoon bigots being terrible to her. (The opening fact about gender-neutral language looks awfully pale and irrelevant in that context.) Her role winds up being an exercise in helping Lia and Achi be more empathetic to the struggles of trans women when they finally meet. While over-extending her solo screen time before meeting the protagonists is certainly preferable to making her a one-scene character whose existence would be even more transparently designed to make easy-to-swallow points about acceptance, it’d be better if her story arc wasn’t just a pileup of tropes used in trans narratives. More notable is the fact that if you took out the scenes where she isn’t directly involved with Lia and Achi and just focused on their story, you would have a very skimpy movie that’d be nothing but predictable emotional beats. Then again, if the reception to his recent work is any indicator, this seems to be working out just fine for Levan Akin.
DIRECTOR: Levan Akin; CAST: Mzia Arabuli, Lucas Kankava, Deniz Dumanli; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; IN THEATERS: July 19; STREAMING: August 30; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 45 min.
