Both predictable and bizarrely edited, the film follows a Georgian woman searching for her trans niece who has fled to Türkiye.
There are slow films with atypical lengths, which are invented before our eyes (Jeanne Dielman was on TV last week) and long, formal films like Crossing Istanbul. The sublime boring films and the clever and boring films. This good academicism, of which we can never say enough bad things: the films are very decent. Who do everything possible to please without making waves.
Lia, a retired Georgian, swore to her sister before her death to find her niece who had left without leaving an address in Turkey to live her life as a trans person, as a repudiated person. With Achi, a young traveling companion and translator, she wanders around Istanbul, surveying the red-light districts. At the same time, Evrim, a committed trans lawyer, with the features of Anna Magnani and the presence of a Divine Sage – as she too should be – survives in the hostile city between social missions and the wait for love.
Crossing Istanbul is a film of tourist anti-tourism, that is to say miserable. Levan Akin is a sort of naturalist Almodóvar who would have replaced the disgusting wallpaper of the decor with filthy walls to the best effect. All the same, the director of photography waters the paving stones and sidewalks with plenty of water to obtain advantageous light reflections in the image, in the night scenes. We pass the time. We visit. We seek without seeking. We talk but we don’t say anything to each other. We find out. We’re really bored. Pitying and excessively stretched, with incomprehensible editing (the meeting between Evrim and Lia, after more than an hour of waiting, is ellipsed!), the film has the forced gravity of the human message that it has given itself the mission of convey: transphobia is bad.
