Soul Kitchen (Saturday, August 21, 2010) (106)

I strongly believe that Fatih Akin is one of the greatest active filmmakers working today. Both Head-On and The Edge of Heaven are brilliant and they suggest to me that the young German writer/director will have a long and interesting career ahead of him.


His most recent effort, Soul Kitchen, is not brilliant, however, and is only sorta good at moments. It suffers from a very messy script and what seems to be a loss of direction or an unclear goal when compared with his earlier works. That it is a screwball comedy is a bit strange from a man who brought some of the most indelible, painful material to the screen in recent years, but screwball material can work when done well. Sadly it's not done well here and is a bit all-over-the-place.


Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) is a restaurant owner in Hamburg. His place, the Soul Kitchen, is a ex-factory-cum-open-dining-room where he serves up microwaved and deep fried frozen food to a devoted, modest clientele. When he meets Shayn (Birol Unel, who had previously brilliantly played the lead role, Cahit, in Head-On) he decides he would like to up-scale his menu and serve fresh stuff that costs more.


Meanwhile Zinos' brother, Illias, is on a work-release program in jail (because he's a criminal) and starts working in the restaurant to get his life back in order. Zinos also bumps into a guy who wants to buy the building the restaurant is in to turn it into a mall. (There are about six further, smaller sub-plots in the film that are too ridiculous to get into.)


I admit that I really wanted to like this film because of my high esteem for Akin's previous work, but I was unable to connect to anything or any characters in particular. Much of the story doesn't make much sense, jumping around between sillier and sillier substories. Frequently the motivations of characters are totally impossible to figure out. That the restaurant is called the Soul Kitchen and there are a few classic American Soul and R&B songs used throughout (though not that many, really) is totally beside the point of the movie. In the end, it could have been called Opera Kitchen or Heavy Metal Kitchen and we could have had the exact same movie. The music is totally secondary to the banal narrative.


I can't figure out if it means something that the story is about a German man of Greek ancestry considering Akin's own Turkish ancestry (and his previous examination of Turkish people in Germany). I think it's a bit of a gag to have done this, but I don't totally understand what he's getting at. Unlike his portrayals of lousy Germans of Turkish extraction in his previous films, here Illias seems like a shallow and sad scumbag with basically no redeeming qualities (despite the fact that the tone is so light that nobody is totally condemned here).


There are some very nicely directed moments here, despite the bad script. Akin uses moving cameras beautifully and tells some clever visual jokes with some of these movements. At one point he shows a drunk woman staggering around before falling on her face. He mimics this with a hand-held shot that jerks around before falling over sideways (a somewhat obvious trick I don't remember ever seeing before). Even with second-rate writing material, he still manages to produce a few great visual moments.


I wish Akin had taken the time with the script here that he had taken with Head-On and The Edge of Heaven (both of which had beautiful scripts). It's possible (and likely) that he's just not a great comedy writer. To that, I say, "stick with what you're good at, Fatih. Please."


Stars: 2 of 4