At the Arthouse
Feel-good fantasy Soul Kitchen is a head banger's delight
Soul Kitchen, the new film by Fatih Akin, is the first German crowd pleaser I’ve ever seen.
Akin, who was born and grew up in Germany but is Turkish by descent, made his cinematic bones in 2004 with the harrowing Head-On, a profound and wrenching exploration of the dislocation young Turks feel in Germany. Even as I watched it, I felt I was getting in on the start of another great European filmmaking career, one in which the filmmaker is free to dig deeply into the painful places where American directors almost never go — when they’re making movies about recognizable human beings at all.
Soul Kitchen touches on some of the same themes as the earlier film (though largely substituting Greeks for Turks), but it’s much lighter, and, as a rather sunny comedy, even has an American feel to it. You’d have to be a grinch to resist its good vibe, but I hope it’s just a playful interlude in Akin’s work.
I also hope that the next time Akin makes a film, Houston has a commercial theater able to offer it in multiple screenings. In the meantime, hats off to Marian Luntz at the MFAH for swooping down on the film when the Angelika, where it had been booked, went under. (It screens Saturday at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 5 p.m. at the MFAH's Brown Auditorium.)
But, you might be asking, what about the movie? Well, Soul Kitchen is a loose jointed, feel-good fantasy, whose plot is fueled by an improbable, to say the least, set of circumstances.
Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) is a Greek living in Hamburg who has bought and restored an old industrial building, converting it into a restaurant where he serves burgers, pizza and the like to a very plebian crowd.
He does the short-order cooking himself until, more or less on a whim, he offers the chef position to Shayn (Birol Ünel of Head-On), a true artiste who’ll pull a knife on a customer who dares ask him to customize a recipe.
After Shayn drives off literally all of Soul Kitchen’s (that’s the restaurant’s name) customers with his haughty menu and ways, a member of the kitchen staff takes advantage of the restaurant’s wide-open spaces to rehearse his three-piece hard rock band. When a handful of the band’s fans show up to listen, the head-bangers start ordering from the fancy new menu and Soul Kitchen is on its way.
This is just one example of the story’s unlikely developments. Hard-partying head bangers spending big euros on beautifully plated food? Not bloody likely.
But the film’s engaging actors makes the story work. They include Moritz Bleibtreu, goofy and affectionate here after his chilling work in The Baader Meinhoff Complex, as Vinos’ ne’er-do-well brother, and Anna Bederke as the Goethe-quoting bartender who loves him.
The characters go through fairly extreme ups and downs, and you can see most of the plot points coming from a kilometer or so away. Let’s just say that the restaurant changes hands more than once. But by the film’s happy—dare I saw “Hollywood”—ending, I was clapping along with everyone else.
But now, Herr Akin, it’s back to work.