REVIEW: Crossing [2024]

Rating: NR | Runtime: 106 minutes
Release Date: November 25th, 2022 (USA)
Studio: MUBI
Director(s): Levan Akin
Writer(s): Levan Akin

I hardly think it was a choice.

Istanbul: a place to disappear or a place of rebirth? It’s really up to the eye of the beholder. Those being left see it as the former. Those doing the leaving as the latter. Especially in the case of Tekla, the twenty-eight-year-old niece Lia (Mzia Arabuli) has decided to find many years after she last saw her. Even that can be looked upon in one of two ways: a little too late or it’s about damn time. Lia sees it as a bit of both considering her mission is half about fulfilling Tekla’s mother’s deathbed wish and half about atoning for her own sin of letting her leave. Because it’s not lost on the audience that Lia does talk about her niece. The trans aspect doesn’t seem to be an issue now. But it surely was then.

Levan Akin’s Crossing follows Lia and the half-brother of her former student (Lucas Kankava’s Achi) leaving Georgia to search for Tekla in Turkey. Achi says he used to smoke with her and that she had friends in Istanbul, so Lia agrees to let him be her translator in exchange for paying his way. Their relationship is guarded at first due to her inability to trust he isn’t using her for his escape, but it’s never not sweet in tone as far as the disappointed “mother” versus exuberant “child” dynamic goes. She wants to assert control and he wants to experience a new place (his “it looks the same” upon crossing the border is delivered with such innocent surprise as though he assumed every country has its own separate reality). It’s not always smooth, but it’s never without compassion.

Running parallel to their quest is Evrim’s (Deniz Dumanli) journey for legitimacy in a place refusing to take her seriously. A trans woman herself, she volunteers at an NGO while awaiting her ID card to officially practice law off a newly minted degree. That pursuit comes with many of the issues that face the trans community everywhere: the constant assumption she’s a sex worker, the need to pay bribes to every hospital department for them to sign off on legally changing her gender, always being disappointed by a boyfriend who won’t be seen in public with her, etc. It’s a necessary glimpse at her struggle that complements the experiences of the sex workers Lia meets first. They show her that Tekla’s smarts and promise mean nothing without a support system to foster them. A support system Lia should have been.

The plot unfolds with straightforward drama as Lia and Achi learn to accept who the other is and what they have to offer in the absence of her niece and his mother. They create a cute makeshift familial bond with an always winking eye since neither is afraid to hustle others for free food or information. We’re asked to presume that this stuck-up teacher and her screw-up companion are polar opposites before finding they’re two peas in a pod. That they have something to offer and can appreciate what it is. Achi gets a taste of the loving discipline he lacked growing up without his parents while Lia discovers she has the maternal instincts to be what Tekla needs … if she’s lucky enough to find her.

Akin isn’t here to make a fairy tale version of reality, though. This isn’t some wide-eyed attempt to show the utopian ideal of the trans experience with an accepting family member. No, it’s an attempt to humanize the trans community so families and friends who have rejected the trans people in their life might realize their bigotry is theirs to own. They can’t blame their child for being trans. They can’t blame society for their hate and fear. They can only blame themselves for voluntarily placing conditions on their love. It means something to hear the sex workers joke that they don’t want their families to look for them and Evrim’s trepidation about helping Lia just in case her motives aren’t pure. The world has forced them to look after their own because it constantly shows it won’t.

The resulting moments of implicit acceptance are thus more profound than anything that could be spoken from a soap box because we’re watching simple, authentic interactions. To see Lia and Achi enter the trans community with open hearts and ears is meaningful. Watching them dance with Evrim at a wedding and to have that wedding’s guests invite them in is meaningful. We’ve moved from Achi’s brother telling Lia to not even try finding her niece because she’s a “stain” on the family to Lia and Evrim hugging outside a hostel for no other reason besides shared humanity. Akin opens the film with text explaining how Georgian and Turkish are genderless languages, but it’s only at the end that we’re surrounded by characters who aren’t judging each other for it.

And the finale? It’s one of the year’s most memorable scenes. I don’t want to give too much away, but my initial smile of acceptance that this sweet and hopeful film would choose to go where it does eventually turned to tears as Akin pulls back to reveal the choice was a path towards introspective epiphany rather than convenient relief. It’s the perfect bookend to contextualize everything that came before as more than a superficial adventure undertaken out of blind duty. It instead proves itself to be a deeply thought-provoking rebirth for Lia herself. Not in the sense that she’s changed who she is, but that she’s finally willing to accept her complicity in a grievous error that may never be able to be rectified. The hope is that someone watching might still have time to fix theirs.