Review: ‘Crossing’ is a journey into empathy for those in transition, in several senses

We know what typically happens in movies when characters go looking for missing loved ones. Surprise — they find themselves. End of quest. But something more nuanced emerges regarding our internal compasses in filmmaker Levan Akin’s “Crossing,” about a retired Georgian schoolteacher trying to track down her transgender niece in Istanbul. It’s what gives this compassionate, cautiously hopeful movie’s open-eyed naturalism a wonderful, pulsating humanity.

Grim-faced, dignified Lia (Mzia Arabuli) doesn’t have much information to go on, only the hearsay of a young, restless operator named Achi (Lucas Kankava), who tells her that her niece Tekla, whom he knew as a local prostitute in their Black Sea port city of Batumi, has likely decamped to one country over. Reluctantly adopting the cocksure Achi as translator and companion — his border excursions with tourists have given him a smattering of Turkish and English (plus Achi wants out of Georgia) — Lia sets off with stoic determination. The question curling the edges of this search, however, is whether Tekla even wants to be found.

Because what’s also clear, and bracingly so in Akin’s thick-of-it depiction, is that massively populated Istanbul makes disappearing easy. One person’s acute sense of absence is for another, perhaps, an opportunity to blend in, as evidenced by the trans neighborhood Lia and Achi encounter, with sex workers popping their heads out of apartment windows to assess these visitors, like some colorful urban advent calendar. The atmosphere simultaneously projects wariness, vivacity and community.

Akin, a Swedish filmmaker whose family originally hails from Georgia, knows this is a story tinged with sadness for lives that have been ostracized and marginalized. But his wider view starts from a place of optimism about what curiosity engenders. The first long, calmly fluid shot in “Crossing,” after the edgily comic vibe of the early minutes, comes when Lia and Achi board one of Istanbul’s intercity ferries, and cinematographer Lisabi Fridell’s camera leaves our mismatched duo to roam the decks so we can feel the peaceful spirit of lives in transit: tea being served, passengers talking, a boy plucking a stringed bağlama as the water rushes by.

It’s a graceful segue for a movie about going somewhere, letting a trip open you up. The sequence alights on the movie’s other significant figure on that ferry, Evrim (Deniz Dumanli), a trans woman lawyer working for an NGO. The movie’s most aspirational character, she meets struggle (like the bureaucracy of getting hospital administrators to sign off on her identity) with friendly poise, finding romance with a kind-eyed cab driver. In crossing paths with Lia and Achi, Evrim knows how to help.

“Crossing” begins with a hard-edged woman trying to bridge a terrible distance, yet it’s measured in incremental expressions of closeness everywhere, across generations, among strangers and between everyone we meet and their possible futures. (Even a street cat plays its connective part.) Whether we’re in daytime or night, there always seems to be a light bathing someone’s face or beckoning them, a visual touch I came to appreciate in a movie that could so easily have taken a more despairing route considering its gritty backdrop.

Akin’s prior film, the queer-themed Tbilisi-set character study “And Then We Danced,” showed how tender his approach to LGBTQI+ stories is, keeping sentimentality at bay while foraging for well-earned smiles. And if you’ve seen that film, which criticized the homophobic strictures of traditional Georgian dance as it celebrated the form’s manifestation of joy, you won’t be surprised that “Crossing” also finds time to bring its pair of weary Georgians to their feet. Lia may not technically be looking for her niece on a restaurant’s dance floor, but as Arabuli’s exquisitely turned, gently cracking performance shows, the life she exhibits is its own discovery.