Crossing

(გადასვლა)

dir: Levan Akin

2024

At the moment, at this very moment, I don’t want to think about, talk about, watch or write about Americans. I am so thoroughly fucking sick of them. I don’t want to have to think about them or their appalling politics, at least for the next, I dunno, four years or so. The way they pervade everything, and force us to have to watch them, like a dog licking its anus and maintaining eye contact with us the whole while, against our will or our own priorities; it is really is quite terrible, honestly.

So instead of thinking or talking about them, let us look at the lives, the troubles, the daily lived realities of a bunch of Georgians and at least one Turkish woman. No, not appalling people from that southern state of the Americas: I mean the former Soviet republic and now currently Russian occupied / vassal state with its own wacky language and alphabet. I mean look at how cool it looks “საქართველო”.
Now that’s wacky. Solely from what I’ve seen in this movie, which I think is my first exposure to movies from this country, I’m guessing it’s a pretty impoverished place. One person’s squalor is another person’s luxury, I guess, but it’s hard to see these lives as occurring in anything other than precarious circumstances.

But that’s how it looks to me. To people from there or around there maybe these people are living the high life, I dunno. When the film starts at some coastal town, there are a bunch of adults in a shack mostly yelling at each other. The main guy is yelling at his wife, who is trying to breastfeed, his younger brother is just waking up, who he seems to routinely violently attack, and he probably also starts yelling at some random cloud floating by. Making matters worse it looks like it’s a one room shack, at best two. Constructed maybe out of cigarette packets, or other shack-like materials.

And then a woman walks past, clearly not from around there but also looking for something or someone.

The yelling guy recognises the woman, and calls down to her politely. She is known as the local teacher, or at least former teacher; I think she’s retired.

They call her, in Georgian, Miss Lia (Mzia Arbuli), out of respect. And it’s probably a respect she deserves, because she is formidable and terrifying. It will be hard for me to explain what she looks like and how she comes across to people who are not from my background. I can say she looks like this person or that person, but that’s not going to get anything across.

I am not Georgian, I am not Turkish, I am not Iranian, Armenian, Albanian or Azeri, or variations thereof. These are names, they mean something to these people from these places. There are profound differences beyond the religious between them. And yet there are profound similarities in looks, in demeanour, in bearing. The languages are completely and fundamentally different, which is shown never more clearly than the fact that this flick mostly featuring Georgian characters has them travelling to Turkey, and having absolutely no linguistic crossover despite being from neighbouring countries, meaning their only hope of getting something across is in the very limited English they might know.

And yet, for me, the profound recognition of similarity within the differences is how familiar Miss Lia looks and acts to me, since she is the spitting image of my godmother, and her mother before her, people whose ancestors, like mine, come from places whose names have changed both in script and nationality over the last hundred years.

And also in how similar the Georgian and Turkish people we see in the film are to my own, despite barely a word in our languages being similar, and the different gods being worshipped. They still feel like ‘my’ people, not in the sense that I ‘own’ them in a colonial way, but I am of them, or not that different from them probably.

So when I watch a story about conservative Georgian society or that mentality, and its hostility towards trans people, or contemporary Turkish society and its hostility towards trans people, this isn’t an experience for me of “damn, them people over there hold some fucked up and outdated views”. I relate to it more along the lines of, “damn, lots of people, including my own, including the ones very similar to my own, are still being awful to all them trans people for no good reason.”

Miss Lia is searching for someone. She promised her sister, who she looked after as she was dying, that she would track down and find her niece Tekla (Tako Kurdovanidze), and tell her that her mother has passed on from this mortal coil, and maybe bring her back to their hometown

The young jerk Achi (Lukas Kankava) not only claims to know Tekla, he knows her whereabouts in Turkey, necessitating a road trip from Batumi and then the ferry across to Istanbul. It’s not made clear yet, but fleeing the intolerance and persecution of religiously conservative / orthodox Georgia for the intolerance and persecution of religiously conservative / Islamic (though secular state) Turkey seems like a recipe for disappointment, but none of these people has that much money. Sometimes you can only go from one pariah / outcast community to another one, at least knowing that you might find someone to be safe with, even if around them are those who look on with disdain or worse.

So, our people here are crossing boundaries, borders, crossing bodies of water, crossing paths with each other, all in the pursuit of kinship, understanding, safety. On the ferry, other than Miss Lia and Achi, who has nothing better to do at home and nothing to do better anywhere else either, there are two foundlings who at least can play instruments, and who live off tips, thievery and picking through garbage. There’s also Evrim (Deniz Dumanl) smoking a cigarette by the ferry’s rail, with whom they’ll interact with later on in Istanbul (not Constantinople).

Evrim has her own story, working as a lawyer / advocate for trans clients, finalising her ID changes (at a local hospital, where the various bureaucrats / heads of department look on with hostility even as they profit from the bribes they accept), navigating romance and random hook ups, fighting for her own path towards acceptance, which is at least a positive path for the film to intersect with.

With Miss Lia, in her interactions with the people who might know where Tekla is, there is the desperate urge to reconnect with her niece, but there is clearly shame as well, shame about having to look for her niece, or because she lost track of her too long ago, or shame because she’s a proud woman and she thinks these societal outcasts are beneath her. She is too fearsome to be ambivalent about her objective, but the film doesn’t follow along the path of her being right. She doesn’t have that luxury and neither do we. The rights of people to live and thrive should not be dependent on the feelings of the people who don’t like them.

Whatever her convictions, beliefs, prejudices, we know she’s also a bit of a hypocrite. She alternates between berating, physically assaulting and tearing strips off of Achi, as well as pitying him every now and then. In him she either sees the failed promise of the younger generations, or just another example of a kid not motivated or intelligent enough to listen to her in the classroom. Also, she’s a fucking drunk, and isn’t good at hiding it.

In a scene where they bump into a generous fellow countryman while at dinner, who perhaps unintentionally gets Lia drunk on raki, she gets all feisty and seductive, and whispers something so terrifying to him that he disappears, thinking perhaps he’s about to have sex with a praying mantis who will happily eat him afterwards (and it would be completely worth it).

She has facets, this Miss Lia, contradictions and strengths and vulnerabilities like the rest of us, but ultimately she seems like she’s going to get her way, regardless of what the world around her believes. But that is not the way the story goes.

Istanbul (not Constantinople) is a beautiful, busy, dirty city, like all the old cities, and it looks great in this flick without looking like a travel video or a promotional piece. It looks like a place where lots of people live, whether in harmony or not. And it has so, so many cats.

And it is also, as Miss Lia finds out, maybe a place people come to from elsewhere in order to not be found, either by those wishing them harm or by those that care for them. Perhaps she had her chance with Tekla, and fucked it up, and all the ill-conceived attempts to track down someone in a city of millions aren’t going to pan out because it’s too late.

That longing to make things up to Tekla is an undercurrent that pulls Lia through the story, through her interactions with the city’s inhabitants. The few times when she’s joyful, like when she’s dancing at someone’s wedding towards the end of the movie, she’s a sight to behold. When she’s salty she’s a terror. I don’t know if she goes on much of a journey in terms of her feelings towards trans people or her niece, but at the very least she is respectful enough towards Evrim when she tries to help them out, and takes them to the people in the know within their community. In terms of how trans people are represented in this flick: they are neither saints nor devils: the every day muck and difficulty of life shows them just as tired, wary people, with good reason. The hostility of the medical community, or the cops, as an example, is depicted as brutish indifference, mostly, in the face of which characters like Evrim have to smile sweetly and push on, knowing that these fuckers are looking for any excuse to persecute her (again, it’s implied).

Crossing is a phenomenal film, which also builds to and ends on an anti-climactic, bitter sweet note, but I daresay that was the right way to go for the film. It takes complex themes and characters and doesn’t simplify them, doesn’t smooth away the difficulties between them, and doesn’t resolve much of anything neatly.

Just like life does to the rest of us, on a daily fucking basis.

9 times I would honestly love to visit Istanbul (not Constantinople) one more time out of 10

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“It seems like Istanbul is a place where people come to disappear” - Crossing

“Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, oh Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks” – They Might be Giants

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27417166/