‘Crossing’

Towards the end​ of Levan Akin’s shape-shifting movie Crossing, a character says that she has begun to think of Istanbul as ‘a place where people come to disappear’. She has strong personal reasons for the thought, having travelled from Batumi in Georgia to look for her sister’s transgender child, who left home long ago, chased out by an angry father. The child’s old name is unknown but it is now said to be Tekla. The aunt, Lia, a former history teacher played by Mzia Arabuli, finally comes across a group of locals who remember Tekla and still have some of her belongings. They don’t know anything about where Tekla went after leaving them.

Lia goes home without seeing her, but not without learning a great deal about alternative modes of life and behaviour. She has met with several countercultures and has found help where she least expected it. She is no longer inclined to think that the chief event of Tekla’s life was to have created ‘a great shame for our family’. Lia has met and been assisted by the transgender Istanbul lawyer Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), who is in the process of being medically certified as a woman. And she has learned to ask a question she would not until recently have thought of: was she sure that Tekla wanted to be found? The answer is provided by Lia’s companion, Achi (Lucas Kankava): ‘No, but she deserves to know someone is looking for her.’

Lia not only becomes willing to think again, she turns into a different person in the course of the movie, crossing, to misuse a key word, from the incarnation of an angry, grim retired teacher to that of a warm, amusing, dancing person. Arabuli manages both roles and the transition wonderfully. People may disappear in Istanbul, but Akin’s film suggests they reappear in other guises, more tolerant and humane than the ones they grew up with. Lia finally concedes that Tekla didn’t fail her family, they failed her. ‘We only cared about what people would say about us.’

There is a sequence in the film that says a lot about the world of assumptions we live in. In an Istanbul café Lia meets a man about her own age, a fellow Georgian, obviously rich. He pays for her meal and buys her a rose from a passing beggar. She thinks he is coming on to her, embraces him warmly and dashes off to the bathroom to fix her make-up. When she returns he is gone, manifestly frightened by her eager interpretation of his kindness. Is this interpretation wrong? It would have been right, it seems, on many occasions inside and outside of movies. It just forgets the unlikely occasion of disinterest.

I need to say something about the personal pronouns I have been using selectively until now. Before the film starts a title card tells us (in English) that Georgian and Turkish are ‘gender neutral languages’, meaning among other things that the same word represents ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’. It’s not that gender doesn’t exist in Georgia or Turkey – its gaps and implications may be fiercer than in many other places, as the parental figures and rife prejudices in the movie suggest. It’s that gender is not announced every time a person is mentioned. The movie’s idea, perhaps, is that there is something liberating in this silence, in not having to line up in narrow columns, not having to identify your siblings’ children as nieces or nephews. But then of course English subtitles have to betray this principle at every step. Tekla is consistently called a niece and a ‘she’, and when a character is told her father kicked her out, he asks: ‘Why, because she was trans?’

At one point I distinctly heard the word ‘trans’ in the Turkish being spoken, obviously borrowed from English even if Turkish and Georgian, we are told, have words of their own for the designation. Akin, who wrote as well as directed the film, follows the dictionary definition (‘denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond to their sex at birth’) and doesn’t ask too much about how the correspondence ceased. This is a good way of thinking about alternative cultural and social forms and avoiding premature labels. I found myself wondering whether Lia, in an imaginative extension of the film’s quest-story, might not have found Tekla after all, again and again, in the diverse characters she met in Istanbul.

Lia has been there only once before, long ago. They speak a language she doesn’t know. The city is hilly and busy and crowded, the sort of haystack no sane person would dream of checking for a needle. Fortunately, before she left Georgia, she acquired the companion I mentioned – an orphaned young man whose main job in life so far has been to annoy the violent, conservative older brother he lives with. Istanbul changes him too. He becomes a caring aide to Lia, who, consistent with her own development, stops telling him to shut up and actually talks to him about what she doesn’t understand.

When she remarks that Tekla’s existence is ‘the life she chose’, Achi replies: ‘I hardly think it was a choice.’ When he asks what her plan is, what she will do if she finds Tekla, what she will say to her, Lia says she has no plan: ‘I’m just here till I’m not.’ At the end of the film, she remembers this conversation in a quick flashback and rethinks what she should have said, including the remark about failing Tekla. A little earlier Achi had an interesting confession to make. The address in Istanbul he gave to Lia, the one he claimed to have received from Tekla herself, was just part of his scheme to get Lia to take him with her on the journey. He had come up with the address, at the heart of a brothel district in Istanbul, by googling the locations of trans communities in the city.

The film has a visual style that is both intimate and tentative. Evrim, for example, appears for the first time in a sideways close-up as just another person on a ferry. When the camera follows her to a hospital for a check-up, we begin to wonder how her story fits into the movie. Is she Tekla? A mirror image of Lia? The heroine of another tale?

There are two moments that draw especial attention to this style. We are in a restaurant with Lia and Achi and the camera is hovering close around them. Then, suddenly, we are outside, looking in from the street through a window. And even better, there is a later shift where we leave the same characters in the room where we have been with them and view them not only through a small window but from a high angle, so that we see mainly the tops of their heads. The camera and the director can do what they like. That’s why they can show us so much, create a world, or several worlds, for us. That’s why we don’t quite know what we’re seeing.