Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

“Soul Kitchen” was supposed to be Hamburg-native (of Turkish parents) Fatih Akin’s next movie after the grim “Gegen die Wand” (Head-On, 2004), but when that won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival , the European film award, Donatello and Goya awards, etc., he felt that a “small Hamburg film” should not be its follow-up. In addition to a segment for “New York, I Love You,” he directed the documentary “Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul” and the feature film “Auf der anderen Seite” (The Edge of Heaven, 2007). And rather than a small film, “Soul Kitchen,” shot on 35mm film instead of digital video and with 200 extras turned out to be the most expensive Akin film to date. In the genial making-of bonus feature on the new DVD, Akin recounts that shooting in Hamburg is much more expensive than shooting in Turkey.

The movie’s title is the name of a diner serving comfort food (including hamburgers) to Hamburgers. The struggling enterprise is owned by the German-Greek Zinos Kazantsakis, who is played by Adam Bousdoukos (who was in Akin’s “In July” and “Head-On. Bousdoukos's experiences as a restaurateur went into the screenplay, for which he received cowriting credit with Akin.

Zinos is harried on multiple fronts, including a girlfriend, Lucia (Anna Bederke), who wants him to join her in China, a brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu, star of “In July,” “The Experiment,” "The Baader-Meinhof Complex") who needs a job to be furloughed daily from prison, health inspectors, tax auditors, and a diva chef Shayn (Birol Ünel, star of “Head-On”) who refuses to give the customers what they want. And Zinos herniates a disc in his back and cannot sit or stand (moving is good but he can only move very gingerly).

The waitress Lucia (Anna Bederke) falling in love with Ilias, who besides being a burglar is a compulsive gambler, does not simplify things. Indeed, the business is a screwball comedy that also includes a rock band needing a place to practice, a crust old ship-builder Sokrates who never pays his rent, and a gradeschool classmate of Zinos’s, Thomas Neumann (Wotan Wilke Möhring) who wants to buy the property for some nefarious developers.

Eventually, Zinos goes to Kemal the Bone Cruncher, the only Turkish character (as opposed to actor: Ünel is supposed to be Romani, Bousdoukos and Bleibtreu Greek), and decides to fly to Shanghai, only to cross paths in the airport with Lucia, who is returning for her grandmother’s funeral.

The restaurant succeeds in a transformation upscale, to the cuisine Shayn wants to make, but unravels in a series of catastrophes (of which an orgy is not particularly one) and Zinos has a difficult time getting his beloved restaurant back after an absence of only a day or two (in which his apartment burns…)

Screwball comedy requires speed and entertainingly eccentric characters. “Soul Kitchen” has both, as well as the usual Akin concern with home as less a physical space than a social aggregate (in this case, brothers who look alike but do not think alike except in placing fraternal bonds first). (The mix of haute cuisine and crime  and humor fits with “Pie in the Sky,” the three seasons of which I have recently watched on DVD—though Bousdoukos is much slimmer and younger than Richard Griffiths.)

I thought that Bleibtreu was great in weathering pratfalls on a drive from Hamburg to Istanbul in Akin’s breakthrough (to international attention) “In July.” His part is smaller in “Soul Kitchen,” but he gets to be the cause—or at least the catalyst—for trouble rather than the one who has to deal with it here, and he seems to have enjoyed himself. Indeed, judging from the making-of feature, Akin and his actors enjoy themselves. Like Robert Altman, Akin’s talent in casting is crucial: both cast actors and actresses they think able to do the role, then encourage them to play in character rather than hewing religiously to the screenplay (which does exist).

©2010, Stephen O. Murray

another review for Foshizzlee's foreign film writeoff

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD