The title wears its wan and melancholy significance a little heavily, and the trompe l’oeil ending is rather mannered, with the kind of flourish that I last saw in Florian Zeller’s film The Son. But Crossing is a thoroughly intelligent, emotionally engaging and robustly performed movie from Levan Akin, the Georgian-Swedish director who had an international breakthrough four years ago with the love story And Then We Danced.
Here, Georgian actor Mzia Arabuli plays Lia, a retired, unmarried history teacher and a person of dignity and high standards for herself and others. She is now on a mission to find her missing niece, a trans woman called Tekla who has crossed the border into Turkey and may now be in Istanbul; Lia promised Tekla’s dying mother she would find Tekla and bring her home. Lia gets a tip about her address from the layabout younger brother of one of her old pupils; this is Achi (Lucas Kankava), a goofy, gormless guy who looks like a young Keith Moon. Achi begs Lia to let him come with her on this exciting trip to the big city and this tense, odd couple finally fetch up in Istanbul.
