One Good Film: "Crossing" (and more)

Every now and then it’s salutary to remind a film reviewer that he or she doesn’t know everything, so I thank Mrs. Movie Critic (and so should you) for alerting me to “Crossing” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2, 2024, streaming on MUBI, for rent on Amazon and Apple TV), a sweetly gritty character drama from the Swedish-born Georgian writer-director Levan Akin, whose 2019 film, “And Then We Danced” caused riots in Tbilisi and Batumi due to its depiction of a gay romance. “Crossing” probably won’t make the protesters any happier, since it concerns a retired Georgian schoolteacher (Mzia Arabuli, whose weathered face is a miniseries in itself) traveling to Istanbul in search of her niece, a trans sex worker. The schoolteacher, Lia, is accompanied by Achi (Lucas Kankava), a rawboned teenage boy desperate to get out of Nowheresville to the big city, and, once in Istanbul, they’re aided by a streetwise trans attorney, Evrim (a marvelous Deniz Dumanli), whose work with the poor and the marginalized makes her something of a saint while giving her a good number of leads in locating the missing Tekla.

The film has a knowledge of Istanbul’s public squares and back streets that feels positively granular – there are more stray cats running around than in 2016’s “Kedi” – and its portrait of a tightly-knit trans community carving out a space in a punitive Muslim society is drawn with empathetic care. The relationship between the old lady and the young man evolves in hilarious and moving directions, each of them pigheaded while capable of unexpected kindness, and the way Akin shows Achi coming of age while Lia recovers something of her youth – the way the two essentially meet halfway – skirts sentimentality through the honesty and clarity of the performances.

“Crossing” debuted at the Berlin Film Festival in early 2024 before bouncing around to other fests (Tribeca, Provincetown) and it came to streaming a year ago after a quickie New York theatrical release. It’s a prime example of the kind of excellent international film that 30 years ago could have made a decent arthouse splash but now disappears into the maw of VOD. In addition to being offered as a cheap rental on Amazon and apple TV, however, “Crossing” has a home on MUBI, the arthouse streaming service (and theatrical distributor) I’ve been spending more and more time with lately and that has in 15 years grown into the best place to find worthy international films – for new global releases, it even beats the Criterion Channel. Expect this newsletter to devote a full post to the service in the coming days, but for now, treat yourself to “Crossings.” It’s a lovely movie. (Thanks, honey.)

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