There’s no description of Levan Akin’s Crossing that won’t make it sound like the kind of feel-good dramedy which would have taken Sundance by storm in 2006. It has all the key ingredients: an inter-generational friendship forged between a curmudgeonly retired teacher and a young burnout desperate to escape his hometown; an epic road trip where they come to understand each other more; and the older of the two confronting her internal bigotry as they search for her transgender niece. Above all, any description makes this sound like the worst kind of LGBTQ story, which we finally seem to have moved past as a culture––the story of queer people aimed firmly at a straight audience. It’s understandable why anybody would be skeptical of Crossing, or at least consider it outdated if not ill-intentioned, from a distance.
But as with And Then We Danced, his debut that emerged at the 2019 Directors’ Fortnight, Crossing gradually reveals that Akin’s true storytelling talent is finding the authenticity beneath the most formulaic of queer narratives. It is perhaps to the film’s detriment that it can’t entirely overcome suspicions that clueless but well-intentioned cis allies were the desired audience, but he avoids the worst aspects of movies made with a similar mindset; there are no overbearing speeches about acceptance, nor any moments where characters have clear breakthroughs in their journeys. It’s as honest as it can be, considering the multitude of cliches which surround the drama.
There’s an additional dramatic cliché thrown in the mix: Crossing falls firmly in the category of the multi-stranded “everything is connected” story which fell out of fashion nearly two decades ago. When teacher Lia (Mzia Arabuli) and young companion Achi (Lucas Kankava) leave Georgia and make their way to Istanbul by car, bus, and ferry, their story begins to intersect with that of a recently graduated lawyer (Deniz Dumanli) whose identity is initially, very purposefully withheld from the audience. Is this Tekla, the estranged niece Lia needs to reconnect with and bring back home to visit her mother one last time on her deathbed? Deeper context for character relationships is rationed out cautiously––not primarily as an intrigue-generating storytelling device in the vein of Michel Franco’s Sundown, but to allow focus to shift towards a more understated depiction of the obstacles in daily trans life within a conservative city.
It’s here where the film finally begins to overcome the various dramatic contrivances established in its opening stretch––there it establishes itself with a sharper grit than the kind of “Sundance movie” it sounds akin to, but doesn’t do quite enough to disguise the well-worn formula at play. But as Lia and Achi board a ferry, Akin’s camera loses them in the crowd and wanders around, eventually meeting its trans protagonist, who is divorced entirely from the high-concept dramatic obstacles motivating the other two. From there the film thrives on this juxtaposition between two very different kinds of queer stories: the lived-in social realism of a trans person going about her daily routine, and a more melodramatic, grittier tale which exists firmly within an outsider’s perspective––a specifically pessimistic one at that, with not-so-subtle undertones that Lia wants to rescue her from this estranged life. The cliches introduced within the opening act suddenly become weaponized, and none of them meet their expected pay-offs; any mental connections we have made between the character studies, even in terms of narrative similarities, fall flat.
If this makes Crossing sound like a project which began life as a writing exercise to find a genuine humanity beneath several of the corniest narrative formulas, then I’ve undersold the extent to which Akin and his three terrific leads make it easy to invest in characters who sound like broad archetypes when described. Considering how the story sounds on paper, it’s all the more impressive that it becomes moving without ever once turning to the kind of pandering weepie I feared from the outset.
Crossing enters limited release on Friday, July 19.