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.
It is here that Akin brings their story into alignment with that of two young street kids and also that of a trans woman, played by Deniz Dumanli, who is involved in sex work but volunteers at an LGBTQ+ community centre. Of course, Akin allows us to wonder if this is who Lia is actually looking for or if there is a figurative sense in which we should be considering this. There are of course many crossings here, although gender transition is unemphasised; the main crossing is the change of mind and the change of heart. There is a trio of excellent performances from Arabuli, Kankava and Dumanli: very good actors, very well directed, defining three personalities very different from each other in terms of age and attitude but bringing them together in a way that doesn’t feel forced.
The film leaves us with the question: why should Lia need to find Tekla, who is after all an adult, not a child, and one who is not necessarily in any sort of trouble? The painful answer is that it is perhaps Lia who needs to be forgiven and needs to be found.
• Crossing is in UK and Irish cinemas from 19 July and on Mubi from 30 August. It will screen in Australia as part of Melbourne international film festival in August
