When Fatih Akin’s “Head-On” arrived last year, not only had the German-born Turk’s rock ‘n’ roll love story been the first German film to win the Berlin Film Festival’s top prize in 17 years (2004), it was one of the best indie features to play in Denver, period.
Beyond making us care deeply about the crazy-love agonies of Turkish immigrants Cahit and Sibel, the movie jarred and seduced with a soundtrack concocted by Alexandre Hacke.
Akin and his composer didn’t limit themselves to the rattling punk riffs and chords his characters lived by. With an episodic flourish, Akin introduced chapters with a band playing traditional music on the banks of the Bosporus. After all, “Head- On” tackled the collisions not just of lovers, but of cultures. It was an East smashes-then-rubs-the-
butts-again against West slam dance.
In Akin’s latest gift, “Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul,” he follows Hacke on a journey to Turkey’s vibrant, cacophonous jewel of a metropol to capture its music. The documentary, opening today at the Starz FilmCenter, is a smart, enjoyable aural travelogue.
The long-haired, bearded Hacke clearly has plenty of street cred with the Turkish musicians he jams with and interviews. He plays in a well- known German avant-garde band. But there’s more to the intimacy than merely being one of them.
He is a journalist, an anthropologist, a participant-observer with broad and generous tastes. He sits playing and listening to the sounds of that massive, beckoning city with psychedelic rockers Baba Zula. A visually lyrical scene shows Hacke listening to street musicians playing on a rooftop far above their usual busking haunts.
Hacke’s authentic curiosity makes him a songcatcher of the first order. His “magic microphone” and the laptop and ministudio he returns to at Istanbul’s Grand Hotel do Londres let him capture, ever so diligently, the moods of his musicians, from rappers to Turkey’s mega rock and pop stars.
For all the variety, Akin insisted on the singular for the title: not sounds, but sound.
Even as “Crossing the Bridge” acknowledges differences, tensions, the provocative power music exerts on our hearts, it makes an elegant, head-bopping, hip-swaying argument that sound unifies.
By featuring a mix of musicians – from pop stars to aspiring rappers, street buskers to Sufi adherents – Akin makes a broader statement about how a culture, an ancient city, dances to so many different rhythms, so many entwined notes and beats. Musicians are stewards of something specific yet evolving.
Not that “Crossing the Bridge” is only sweetness and light. The film addresses the fact that in 1980 Turkey banned its ethnic minorities from playing or singing their traditional music.
We don’t necessarily need Kurdish singer Aynur’s wondrous dirge to know this was wrong. But her rich, steady tone reminds you that some laws can be crimes against us all. The ban was lifted in 1990.
“Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul” | *** 1/2 RATING
NOT RATED|1 hour, 32 minutes|MUSIC DOCUMENTARY|Directed by Fatih Akin; photography by Hervé Dieu: featuring Alexandre Hacke, Baba Zula, Orhan Gencebay, Sezen Aksu, Selim Sesler, Erkin Koray, Istanbul Style Breakers, Brenna MacCrimmon |Opens today at Starz FilmCenter.
