Chuck Wilson
Crossing, the moving new film from Levan Akin, writer/director of the much loved And Then We Danced, opens with a woman known to all as Miss Lia (Mzia Arbuli) striding by the beach outside the Georgian town of Batsumi, along the Black Sea. A retired history teacher, she appears to be heading somewhere specific, but Lia will turn out to be a woman who always walks with purpose, even when completely out of her depth, as she is now. A moment later, she’s spotted by a former student, a surly fellow who’s just been haranguing his half-brother, the 18-ish Achi (Lucas Kankava). Lia says she’s looking for the current location of a niece who had been living in a nearby cottage. Her mother, Lia’s sister, has just died; Lia promised to find her child and bring her home.
“She calls herself … Tekla,” Lia says hesitantly, as if she’s never said the name aloud before. “She’s talking about one of those trans girls,” Achi proclaims, to the dismay of his brother, who offers Lia his condolences, adding that having a trans relative is “a real tragedy.” Does Lia agree? Maybe.
As she leaves, Achi gives chase, saying he has an address for Tekla in nearby Istanbul. He can be Lia’s guide in the search for Tekla. Clearly desperate to get away, he’s full of promises he can’t possibly keep. Lia looks at him with her arms crossed and lips pursed, a teacher who’s heard every form of nonsense, but she agrees. Later, as you replay Crossing in your mind, you might realize that without Achi’s address for Tekla, Lia would have had no idea where to go next.
That night, Lia dreams of a young hand with painted nails caressing her face, a hint that Lia needs to find Tekla not just to keep a promise she made to her dying sister but to assuage the guilt she feels for not sticking up for Tekla when she came out as trans. “What will you tell her if you meet her?” Achi asks, but Lia cannot answer. It is the search itself that pulls her forward, even as she approaches the various trans enclaves of Istanbul with fear in her eyes and not a little judgment in her heart.
On an Istanbul ferry, Akin and his And Then We Danced cinematographer, Lisabi Fridell, send their hand-held camera floating around the ship to capture workday passengers being served tea on gilded trays, as if aboard a luxury liner, and on a lower deck, a boy singing and strumming a lute for coins. He has a little girl at his side. Like the heroes from a Vittorio De Sica neo-realist drama of old, the two will eventually cross paths with Lia and Achi, and with Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans lawyer riding on an upper deck.
Akin begins to crosscut among the five, with an emphasis on the charismatic Evrim, who has just graduated law school and is working for a trans rights NGO. Evrim has completed her own transition, and needs only to grease enough palms at the local hospital to obtain her official female identification paperwork, a corrupt process she accepts with surprising cheer. Although it takes most of the film’s running time for Evrim’s daily path to finally cross with Lia and Achi, she’ll prove essential in bringing Lia closer to Tekla.
But even Evrim’s powers have limits, and questions about Tekla linger. Akin is too empathetic a filmmaker to leave Lia hanging, so he devises a narrative flourish — a cinematic wrinkle in time — to settle her unanswered questions, and to ease her heart. The intent is generous, but the sequence feels underwritten and more awkward than affecting.
Akin is on more solid ground when he lets the natural flow of Istanbul life dictate action and feeling. That’s Evrim’s gift, too — taking the day as it comes. At the end of a hard day of searching, she leads Lia and Achi to a restaurant where a wedding celebration is taking place. It’s crowded, but Evrim is greeted warmly. She is known and welcomed all over the city.
You might notice that Achi holds Lia’s chair for her — he is not the loutish boy he was at the story’s start. Evrim pulls him to the dance floor. He hesitates. Can Achi dance? Of course he can. He is Georgian, and traditional dance is second nature. But he won’t dance without Lia. Soon, Lia, Achi, and Evrim have joined in the joyous dance circling the bride. Lia throws her head back, exultant. This won’t be the end of her story, or of her search for Tekla, but for a long sweet moment, she’s in a well-earned state of grace.
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