Soul Kitchen

In the great tradition of culinary clichés that critics dust off when discussing foodie flicks, I’m tempted to say that Soul Kitchen “melts in your mouth” or has a “soufflé-like consistency.” Yet even these airy phrases imply some sort of nourishment, no matter how tantalizingly brief. Though likeable and high-spirited in spots, Fatih Akin’s comedy is so insubstantial that it practically dissolves in front of you. It’s like clearing the table before the meal was served! (Okay, I’ll stop…)

This partially has to do with Akin and Adam Bousdoukos’ script, a mishmash of hectic subplots pitched in the key of sitcom. Zinos Kazantsakis (Bousdoukos), a Greek-German restaurateur, operates the titular greasy spoon, a run-down converted warehouse that serves up fatty delights and funk, soul, and R&B to a small but loyal group of Hamburg residents. But things quickly begin spinning out of control for Zinos and company (and I mean spinning; Akin’s camera swings and races about from the first ostentatiously wide-angled shot onward). His girlfriend, Nadine (Pheline Roggan), takes a job in Shanghai, and Zinos belatedly decides to join her after she leaves. But first he has to decide whether to give up Soul Kitchen, and whether he can leave it in the hands of its current staff: hard-drinking waitress and aspiring painter Lucia (Anna Bederke); new prima donna chef Shayn (Birol Ünel), whose more rarefied dishes initially turn off the regular clientele; and troubled brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu), a sweet-hearted convict on day leave to work (read: hang around) at the restaurant. Factor in a ever-worsening back injury, a cutthroat real estate agent (and former grade school pal of Zinos’) angling to tear down the restaurant for the property underneath, and a burgeoning romance between Illias and Lucia, and you have a sense of the sort of freewheeling character face that Akin is going for.

Certainly, Soul Kitchen is not lacking in energy. Apart from the aforementioned freewheeling camerawork, Akin throws in a bunch of other aesthetic tricks—food prep montages! sudden zooms! canted angles!—to keep the gears audibly whirring. But there’s a difference between high-octane fun and simply spinning your wheels, and too often Soul Kitchen provides doses of free-floating comic craziness without laying the groundwork of character and plot mechanics necessary to connect these bursts of liveliness to anything tangible onscreen. This is particularly true of Akin’s constant use of funk and soul music. Yes, it peps up just about any scene it’s used in, but let’s face it: put Kool and the Gang’s “Rated X” over footage from the Department of Motor Vehicles, and it’ll seem downright rollicking. How the music connects on any deeper level with the film’s themes or characters remains largely ignored, besides some vague notion of “cosmopolitanism” seen in Soul Kitchen’s casual mixing of characters from divergent and sometimes hyphenated ethnic backgrounds.

Such an outlook has become somewhat of a calling card for Akin, a German-Turkish filmmakers whose previous two films released in the U.S.—Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007)—focus on characters with mixed heritages and transnational mindsets. Yet watching these three films together, you begin to get the sense that Akin has yet to really settle on what kind of filmmaker he actually wants to be. Head-On had an intriguing sympathy for the seriously self-destructive couple at its center, but its hyperactive style felt akin to many independent and middlebrow art films released over the past 15 years. And while it contained some sterling performances and affecting moments, The Edge of Heaven felt even more generic: one of those somber network narratives that reveals that, underneath differences in ethnicity and social class, we’re all connected in our shared hopes and sufferings. (What a shocker!). Soul Kitchen certainly feels a world away from that film’s soberness, yet it’s hard to discern what makes Akin’s comedy distinctive and fresh. I say this not to try and squeeze the peg of Akin’s filmmaking into some rigid auteurist hole (and further admit that I have not seen the four features he made prior to Head-On). But for a filmmaker frequently lauded as a rising star on the international film scene, I have yet to see what exactly it is about Akin’s films that deserve such attention, apart from his unique perspective on the issue of German-Turkish identity.

Ironically, the scenes that prove most memorable in Soul Kitchen are precisely when Akin seems to step off the directorial gas a bit and simply let his characters be. Easily, the film’s best scene is a rollicking concert sequence in the restaurant right before Zinos plans to take off to Shanghai. It’s spiked with an obvious comic twist (Shayn liberally sprinkles the dessert with a tasty Honduran tree bark that doubles as an aphrodisiac), but Akin mostly lets things unspool casually: Zinos and Illias sharing an affectionate brotherly dance; crabby old coot Socrates (Demir Gökgöl) drunkenly enjoying the music he usually blocks out with large earplugs; Illias and Lucia silently deciding to sleep with one another with one extended look across the room. Such moments hardly break new ground, but they feel sharp and funny in a way that the rest of the film, for all its high-strung antics, rarely achieves.

                                            Matt Connolly