Genuine silent, genuine classic

Lady Windermere’s Fan 1925 Warner Brothers (89 minutes) directed by Ernst Lubitsch.

Taking Oscar Wilde at his word that ‘life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about,’ Ernst Lubitsch put a movie camera in Wilde’s place and let his pictures tell the story.

Lubitsch’s silent classic is a glib visual take on Wilde’s comedy of manners on the hypocritical morals of the great and good, featuring an ingénue and an openly sexual divorcée, hale and hearty fellows having too much fun and their disapproving shrews having too little.

Lady Windermere (May McAvoy), a young wife and paragon of virtue, is married to Lord Windermere (Bert Lytell) though flirtatiously pursued by Lord Darlington (Ronald Colman, ‘courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn’).

In the opening shot, Lady Windermere, facing ‘the grave problem of seating her dinner guests,’ the placard says, moons over whether to seat that darling naughty gadabout next to her.

Right away, Darlington ‘is announced’ and soon appears; he gives her hand a manly shake and holds on a beat too long. She looks at their clasped hands: the camera closes up on her fingers relaxing in his closed hand. He raises her relaxed fingers to his lips. She pulls them away, and looks away from him: he bends over and pecks the back of her left hand.

‘I presume you came to see my husband,’ the placard says.

‘Oh no, I came to see you,’ his lips—and eyes—reply.

She draws away from him, her chin in the air, and sits with her back to him on a couch, resting her arms on its arm—leaving him plenty of room to sit down beside her. 

This pas de deux leads to the next room, where Lord Windermere quickly pockets a letter he was reading. The men shake hands. Windermere speaks to his wife. Darlington notices that Windermere is trying to reach and pocket an envelope on his desk that has a ‘notorious’ woman’s return address, and that Windermere seems anxious that his wife not see it. Darlington subtly slides the envelope within his reach; the two men exchange raised eyebrows.

Working within the limits of the technology at the time, the acting is mostly in mime—a lost art in cinema now, but an art nonetheless—and done here with great skill. (David Denby provides insight on this subject in The New Yorker with reference to the current success of last year’s ‘silent film’ in his recent piece The Artists, Feb. 27, 2012.)

 The action and sets are closely observed; the shots are sequenced and built at a comfortable pace that holds the eye. The sets have palatial depths and high ceilings—so high that they may be operatic flats—and the light is soft and subdued.

It is best to watch this film entirely silent. The softly reverent piano music added to this DVD release patronizes this racy work with an unduly quaintified, ‘old-timey’ feel. Instrumental tunes by Cole Porter would make a better complement, but Lubitsch’s visual art stands on its own. If you must, pick your own soundtrack.

The most humorous and inventive scene takes place at a racetrack. The Windermere party sits together in an enclosure seeing and being seen by all and sundry, particularly the film’s femme fatale, Mrs. Erlynne (Irene Rich). Framed in a series of sideways ‘figure eights,’ Mrs. Erlynne, in her silk turban with feathers and her flapper style, is ‘observed’ through binoculars by silk-hatted society toffs in morning coats and striped trousers and their disapproving female company—observed, and basking in the attention.

‘Gossip, gossip, gossip,’ the placard says of the Duchess of Berwick (Mme. [Carrie] Daumey), Lady Plymdale (Billie Bennett—uncredited) and Mrs. Cowper-Cowper (Helen Dunbar), which they relish with malicious glee, while their men and Lord Augustus Lorton (Edward Martindel), ‘London’s most distinguished bachelor,’ gawk and make the appropriate responses—and ‘check out the babe’ on their own.

Lord Augustus follows Mrs. Erlynne when she leaves the track heading in the direction of a large ‘Exit’ sign showing a hand with a pointing finger. He quickens his pace to catch up with her and as he does, the frame narrows to the left.

The film, which takes place over a period of several months, elaborates upon the 24-hour period of Wilde’s play, but the plot, point and humor remain the same.

Lady Windermere, raised an orphan, believes that her parents died when she was an infant: her mother dishonored the family by running off with a lover ‘to the continent’; her father died of a broken heart. Mrs. Erlynne, Lady Windermere’s mother, returns to England from ‘abroad’ with a scheme to ‘get back into society’ by remarrying well.

She plans to accomplish this by ‘blackmailing’ Lord Windermere, who does not want his wife to find out that Mrs. Erlynne is her mother, into financing her visit and sponsoring her ‘reentry.’ Mrs. Erlynne plans to use his influence to leverage an introduction that will position her to catch a husband ‘of the right sort.’

The ‘fan’ of the title, one of Lord Windermere’s birthday gifts to his wife, links mother and daughter by giving Mrs. Erlynne a second chance: it enables her in the end to spare her daughter from making the same mistake that led to her ‘banishment’ from society.

This film can be found among many others in the series More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931; Program 3, reissued by the National Film Preservation Foundation. It was preserved by Museum of Modern Art, copied at its original 22 frames per second from a 35mm print.

Included on this DVD is a ten-minute series of trailers of films since lost, including In the Days of Daniel Boone, American Venus (including a shot of 19-year-old Louise Brooks in her first title role), The Great Gatsby and Lubitsch’s The Patriot.

True poetry

시 Shi (Poetry) 2011 South Korea Kino-Lorber (139 minutes) written and directed by Lee Chang-dong.

The jacket of this film says that it is about ‘an aging part-time maid’ raising an ‘apathetic’ teenage grandson and taking a poetry class because she is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

It identifies Yun Jung-hee, an elderly woman in a white sunhat pictured on the front who plays the grandmother, as Korea’s ‘greatest actress.’ It notes that the film’s writer and director Lee Chang-dong’s screenplay won at Cannes in 2011.

All of this is true. Yet none of it prepares one for the remarkable work of art that this movie turns out to be.

In place of music, the film has a sense of all-pervading quietness, occasionally broken by sounds of nature or manmade noise. This would describe the quietness of a solitary life. What is remarkable about it is that Lee’s narrative fully engages the viewer, maintaining an unhurried but steady pace without resorting to clichéd techniques such as ‘pensive’ empty spaces and plainly mute—and deadly boring—‘atmospheric’ pictures. 

There are actually several narrative threads that weave into a whole by the end of the picture. Nothing is random, and nothing is wasted.

Four small boys playing on a river bank discover the body of ‘Agnes’ Park Hee-jin (Han Su-yeong) floating down the river. Hee-jin was a schoolgirl who took her own life by jumping from a high bridge.

Yang Mi-ja (Yun Jung-hee) is an aging woman whose doctor is concerned that her slowly developing inability to find common words indicates the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Leaving the clinic, Mi-ja is disturbed when she sees Hee-jin’s distraught mother (Park Myeong-sin), barefoot and keening, outside the emergency room where the girl’s body was brought.

Mi-ja relates this scene to the shopkeeper daughter-in-law of Elder Kang (Kim Hee-ra), a severe stroke victim whom she bathes and for whom she does his laundry and housework to supplement her social security pension.

Everyone is polite to Mi-ja, but no one seems to pay much attention to this reticent older woman who dresses inexpensively but with an elegance that nearly everyone remarks. Everyone, that is, except for her grandson Jong Wook (David Lee) a typical, thoughtless teenage boy whom Mi-ja is raising for her divorced daughter who lives elsewhere in Korea.

Mi-ja enrolls in a poetry class at a local community center. She thinks using words might help her combat forgetting them, and she always wanted to learn to write poetry. The class consists of about a dozen middle-aged women and a man, taught by Kim Yong-taek, a Korean poet who plays himself in the film.

Mi-ja is the oldest student. She gets Yong-taek’s attention right away—as well as that of the other students—because she readily admits her ignorance by asking earnest, basic questions that anyone introduced to art would ask, but that most would find too embarrassing. Moreover, Mi-ja persists until satisfied that her interlocutor has answered her question to the extent of his ability.

This challenges the person being asked the question, rather than highlight the questioner’s presumed ignorance. It is an important key to Mi-ja’s character and the narrative, because she does so in a spirit of genuine inquiry. But it takes a thoughtful and self-confident person challenged in this way to respond fairly and adequately—as true in life as it is of art. This is what makes this movie really stand out.

The ‘life’ part is that Jong Wook and a group of his school friends are connected with Hee-jin’s suicide. The boys’ fathers, identified only as such, get in touch with the virtually destitute Mi-ja to try to find a way to buy the silence of Agnes Hee-jin’s mother (like the fathers, identified only as the ‘parent of’ one of the children).

The remarkable character that the actress Yun Jung-hee creates and this character’s idiosyncratic search to understand what it takes to make a work of art braid the disparate narrative strands into an unforgettable story.

Click here to see the theatrical trailer.

Blame it on Fidel!

La faute à Fidel! (Blame It on Fidel!) Gaumont, 2006, France (95 minutes), written and directed by Julie Gavras.

There is no sex nor shooting, no car chases nor celebrities in this picture. What it has is an unusually self-possessed little girl with an intelligent and expressive face and a director who gets a remarkable performance out of her and knows how to film her. 

Nine-year-old Anna de la Mesa (Nina Kervel) has a problem. She has a very clear idea of things comme il faut, and what she wants and needs.

But it is Paris in the early 1970s, hung-over from the upheaval of May 1968 when upward social mobility caught up with postwar economic prosperity and turned the traditional conservative Roman Catholic France of Charles de Gaulle on its ear.

Anna’s parents, Fernando (Stefano Accorsi) and Marie (Julie Depardieu), both university-educated professionals from affluent backgrounds, are trying to find their way in the brave new vanguard of the left as they bring up Anna and her 4-year-old brother François (Benjamin Feuillet).

Not just affluent: Marie’s parents live at house and vineyard with the family name in Bordeaux; Fernando’s parents were Spanish aristocrats with ties to General Francisco Franco, in power in Spain since the end of the civil war in 1939 (Franco died in November 1975).

The movie opens at the wedding of Marie’s sister, Isabelle (Marie Kremer), at their parents’ estate in Bordeaux. Anna, at the head of a table of small children, looks on with cool disdain as the other children mangle fruit with a knife and fork after she perfectly has peeled an orange.

A girl Anna’s age stares silently at her untouched peach.     

‘P'quoi ne fait rien elle?’ another girl asks.

‘Elle ne parle pas français,’ Anna says. ‘Elle s’appelle Pilar. Elle est espagnole.’

Pilar (Raphaëlle Molinier) is Anna’s cousin. She is in France with her mother Marga (Mar Sodupe), a political exile from Spain where her husband was killed by the regime. Anna is unhappy because her father has invited his sister Marga and Pilar to live with them in Paris. This is only the first of many changes Anna will be forced to face.

Fernando, a lawyer and ‘parlor pink’, has resolved to get more engaged in politics. He quits his job to get more involved in the left-leaning politics of Latin America. Marie, a staff writer at the French women’s magazine Marie Claire, will support the family. But Fernando encourages his wife also to become politically active: Marie takes aim at the country’s 50-year-old law banning abortion.

Reduced circumstances means moving from their house to an apartment and Fernando’s new activism fosters a beard and a collection of bearded young men in the place at all hours. He supports his wife’s desire to write a book arguing that abortion should be a woman’s choice, which takes her to the busy center of political feminism.

But most of this activity is captured in bits and pieces, processed through the eyes of the watchful nine-year-old Anna, taught by a nun (Carole Franck), close to a patrician grandmother (Martine Chevallier) who finds subjects like sex and feminism things better left unsaid, and whose school friend Cécile (Gabrielle Vallières) calls Anna’s parents ‘beatnik-hippies’ without any idea of what that means. Anna’s Cuban nanny Filomena (Marie-Noëlle Bordeaux) fled the Castro regime and tells her that communists are red ‘barbudos’ who do not fear God.

Everyone talks; but most of the adults are so wrapped up in themselves and their causes that they forget that this alert little person taking in all this ferment is only nine years old.

After Fernando and Marie let Filomena go because they can no longer afford a full time nanny, Filomena tells Anna that her parents ‘fired’ her because they are communists. She tells Anna that she lost her house in Cuba because of the communists, ‘and now you must abandon yours!’

‘C’est Fidel! Il se rend tous fous!’ Filomena says.

‘Mais alors, c’est la faute à Fidel!’ Anna declares, giving us the title. But for all the ‘blame’ ascribed to him, Anna really has no idea who—or what—this ‘Fidel’ is.

In the same sense, Anna watches her grandfather (Olivier Perrier) grieve over the death of General Charles de Gaulle in November 1970. A television announcer solemnly tells the public: ‘La France est veuve.’

‘Le Général est mort. Tout est fini,’ her grandfather says, glumly staring out a window.

Later, Anna sees her Aunt Isabelle, visiting Marie, weeping inconsolably. No one tells Anna that Isabelle is distraught because she is pregnant before she wants to be.

‘Is it because of The General?’ Anna asks her mother, with concern for Isabelle, again picking up on the tone without much of an idea who this ‘General’ is.

Writer and director Julie Gavras based her screenplay on Domatilla Calmai’s novel Tutta colpa di Fidel, with details from her own life. Like Sophia Coppola, Gavras, daughter of director Costa Gavras of Z (1969), État de siège [State of Siege] (1972) and Missing (1982), knows whereof she speaks.  

One of the wonders of this well cast, well made film is that Gavras makes working with these child actors look so easy. Like Morris Engel’s child actors, neither is a professional and this is the only film in which they have appeared.

The story is seen mainly through the eyes of a child, but Gavras also has taken care to show that these times are formative years for each of her characters. The action takes place roughly from the fall of 1970, when de Gaulle died and Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, to Allende’s ouster in September 1973.

There is a resonant echo of the opening ‘orange’ scene near the end of the film, when Emilio (Francisco Lopez-Ballo), one of Fernando’s ‘barbudos’, uses an orange he peels by hand to explain to Anna his views on the redistribution of wealth.

The best developed relationship is that of Anna and her mother, which makes a comment on the first generation of mass market political feminism.

Anna listens out of sight to the women Marie interviews for her book, and Marie in a sense ‘grows up’ alongside her daughter through her raised awareness in the work she does that genuinely helps women. In this way, she eclipses her husband, involved in revolution in theory, at a distance.

Lovers' leap

Der Krieger und die Kaiserin (The Princess and the Warrior) 2000 Germany (133 minutes) written and directed by Tom Tykwer.

This hyperreal modern romantic tale ends where it begins, a construct of ‘accidents’ brought about by the psychic necessity of a man and woman who need each other to save themselves.  

The Princess—Simone ‘Sissi’ Schmidt (Franka Potente)—is an enchanted princess in a strange land: a nurse in a closed ward of a modern psychiatric hospital where she has lived her whole life. Her mother, a nurse in the same institution, died when a hairdryer fell into her bathtub; her father is one of the current inmates.

The Warrior—Bodo Riemer (Benno Fürmann)—is a former soldier who lives in a shack with his older brother Walter (Joachim Król), a bank security officer and also a former soldier. Bodo is ‘spellbound’ by severe post-traumatic stress caused by the accidental sudden death of his wife, consumed in a ball of fire at the gas pump of a highway service station while he was in the restroom.

An accident that Bodo unknowingly causes while fleeing pursuers—he momentarily distracts the driver of a tractor-trailer, whose truck hits Sissi in a marked pedestrian crosswalk while she is crossing a city street—also brings him to Sissi’s rescue.

Bodo shoots down a side street and does not see the accident. Still trying to evade his pursuers, he circles back to the scene and finds Sissi injured beneath the truck. He makes a quick assessment and performs a field tracheotomy on her worthy of a trained combat medic that saves her life.

However, more than just saving her life, Sissi is convinced with a single-minded certainty that through his intervention, this stranger is revealed to her as the agent of her transformation. After recovering from the accident, she finds and then pursues him.

Bodo, though ‘training to fly’ from the film’s start, repeatedly rejects Sissi’s steadfast pursuit. He possibly is battling within himself over the redemption he can sense in her, but feels that he does not deserve; presumably he feels responsible for his wife’s death. But he stays with Sissi after she coincidentally turns up and helps him flee a bank robbery in which he and his brother were involved that goes wrong.

Together in Sissi’s ‘enchanted realm’, Bodo’s presence and Sissi’s special concern about him provokes an incident that gives Sissi insight into her mother’s ‘accident’.  Bodo accedes to Sissi’s vision, introducing the possibility for each of them to overcome his individual trauma.

One of the most striking things about this story is that is a throwback to the early nineteenth century German Romantics, particularly the writer and dramatist Heinrich von Kleist and his use of the novella. In essence, this form comprises an unusual but not improbable central event, a surprise reversal, and a recurring theme.

The narration is pared down to clean plot lines and decisive action, which make the form ideal for movie-making. What writer and director Tykwer has done here is to combine simultaneously a pair of his own such ‘novellen’:

Two intrinsically good people with solid cores are alienated from conventional life, each adrift as though enchanted due to a traumatic life experience: the accidental deaths of one’s mother and the other’s wife. Each participates in what becomes the other’s surprise reversal: a traffic accident and a foiled bank robbery. No detail or action is random. The recurring theme is flight. In the end, Sissi and Bodo together discover the ‘wings’ to fly free of their enchantments and break the spells under which they live.

But this account does not include the lovely camerawork, music in which Tykwer also had a hand, and many small moments and contributing roles that make this two-hour film a compelling story to watch. Click here for the theatrical trailer.

The inmates in Sissi’s enchanted realm are similar to those of Milos Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), each carefully rendered and intense, closely tethered to the peg of his illness, but within the context of story background. It is clear that the patients are inside for their own and society’s safety. The well cast medical staff on which Sissi serves is liberal and tolerant.

Sissi’s ‘reversal’—Bodo’s well choreographed flight through Wuppertal that leads to her accident—is a kinetic, heart-racing scene captured in a fleet montage of roughly 35 shots in slightly more than a minute.

Otto (Melchior Beslon), a blind patient, is with Sissi when her accident occurs—she pushes him out of the way at the last minute, saving him from being hit by the truck. He later uses his aural memory to help her reconstruct the accident scene so she can find the man who saved her life.  

At the crucial moment, Sissi takes Bodo’s hand for a poetic leap of conviction portrayed as an expressive flight of fancy both into reality and beyond its bounds.

The story closes as it opened, wordlessly at an early nineteenth century villa on Bronte-esque treeless promontory above the wild French Atlantic coast (actually Cornwall, England). A letter written and posted from this house set the action in motion, put Sissi in the bank, and then wraps up the story when it brings the action back home.

Kleist has been popular among French filmmakers. Erich Rohmer learned German to write and direct a classic German version of Kleist’s novella Die Marquise von O. Arnaud des Pallières currently is shooting the latest version of Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaus.

Robert E. Helbling’s Heinrich von Kleist; Novellen und Ästhetische Schriften, Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 1967, was consulted in preparing this review.

Jeepers creepers!

El orfanato (The Orphanage) 2007 Spain (105 minutes), directed by J. A. Bayona, presented by Guillermo del Toro (director of Pan’s Labyrinth).

Fair warning: this is a well-made, hair-raising, emotionally intense, look-over-your-shoulder ghost story.

Laura (Belén Rueda) and her doctor husband Carlos (Fernando Cayo) bring their young adopted son Simón (Roger Príncep) to live in the house where Laura grew up, the orphanage of the title, an antique mansion in Llanes, Asturias, on Spain’s Atlantic Coast.

They bought the house with the intention to open a home for a small number of special needs children in addition to their HIV-positive son. Soon after they arrive, Simón claims that he has a number of invisible children as friends.

Strange activities seem to occur in the house, such as an old woman hiding in a utility shed with a garden spade, though many of these occurrences at the same time seem to have simple, rational explanations. Then Simón disappears without a trace during an open house Laura and Carlos give for prospective patients and their parents.

Pipes bangs and floorboards creak, old outdoor playground equipment squeaks as it blows in the brisk coastal wind. Small items get moved around. Laura, convinced that Simón is alive, dedicates herself to find him and to get to the bottom of the dark secret that plagues the house. She and Carlos even employ a Jung-inspired team of paranormal researchers, which includes a psychic named Aurora, played by Geraldine Chaplin.

When these steps fail, Laura turns to cryptic clues that Simón intimated in play with her before he disappeared, as well as memories from her own childhood in the orphanage, to get to the bottom of the mystery.

Hipness on the edge of town

Soul Kitchen 2009 Germany (99 minutes) directed by Fatih Akin, screenplay by Fatih Akin and Adam Bousdoukas.

At the heart of the high jinks and rollicking good times, this is a movie about taking ownership—of one’s life, one’s passion, one’s dreams, one’s home.

Fatih Akin said in an interview that he co-wrote the story with actor and longtime friend Adam Bousdoukas in the kitchen of the Greek restaurant that Bousdoukas owns in Hamburg. They meant to celebrate their hometown Hamburg and based many of the stories and details on Bousdoukas’ restaurant experience.

Zinos Kazantsakis (Bousdoukas) is a Greek-German who owns and runs ‘Soul Kitchen’, a greasy spoon that serves deep fried fish, fries, burgers and alcoholic beverages to local working stiffs in Wilhelmsburg, an old industrial area of Hamburg.

Illias Kazantsakis (Moritz Bleibtreu), Zinos’ brother, is a professional burglar nearing the end of a prison sentence, released on weekend days in a partial parole program. His release extends to weekdays after he talks Zinos into ‘hiring’ him for what Illias takes to be a ‘no-show’ job that lets him hang out at the restaurant with his henchmen Milli (Cem Akin) and the neighing Ziege [goat] (Marc Hosemann).

Nadine Krüger (Pheline Roggan), Zinos’ girlfriend, is a German princess who looks like a Botticelli subject. She wants Zinos to put someone in charge of his restaurant and to come with her to Shanghai where she is to work as a journalist. At her family going-away dinner in a fancy Hamburg restaurant, presided over by her imperious Großmutter (Monica Bleibtreu), a chef nearly comes to blows with a customer who wants his gazpacho ‘heated’.

The chef, Shayn Weiss (Birol Ünel), is promptly fired. Zinos likes Shayn’s spirit and hires him for Soul Kitchen. Shayn demands that Zinos entirely remake his menu—‘Essen für die Seele!’ [food for the soul], he says—which upsets Zinos’ regulars, whom Shayn berates [as above] as ‘uncultured peasants’. The restaurant’s business drops off.

Zinos hurt his back trying to move a broken dishwasher. His business is dead in the water. A tax collector arrives seeking unpaid back taxes; a real estate macher Zinos knew in school sics the health department on Soul Kitchen, hoping to force its sale. And Nadine is in China nagging him to come ‘as he promised’.

Then hipsters from a nearby dance club and musicians ‘discover’ the new Soul Kitchen and its chef. The place becomes an overnight sensation. This solves Zinos’ cash flow problem, but none of his staff, from Lucia Faust (Anna Bederke), his painter waitress, to his knife-throwing mystic chef Shayn, want to manage the place while he joins Nadine. Dare he put his very livelihood into the hands of the many-wiled Illias?   

Great music and a dessert liberally seasoned with a powerful aphrodisiac served to a full house make for a wild party that culminates in the tax office cougar finding the real estate macher. 

This is an upbeat movie filled with sympathetic characters, with an ending that blooms. It shows that Akin, best known for his films Gegen die Wand [Head On] (2004) and Auf der anderen Seite [Edge of Heaven] (2007) which explore identity issues of those born and raised in a culture different from their parents (i.e., born to Turkish parents Germany), has the skill and grace to convey serious matters in a light but no less serious way, not counting his road/romantic comedy Im Juli [In July] (2000).

A viewer gets the sense that the cast and crew are having fun on the set. Akin gets great work out of everyone, and the music gives the narrative a lot of zip.  

The soundtrack is along the lines of a Quentin Tarantino project, though arguably much better. The brief opening credits run with Kool & the Gang’s ‘X-Rated’, until the camera pans to the film title—the restaurant’s name ‘Soul Kitchen’ in a 1970s-retro black and white graphic on the front of the building—and cuts to Zinos deep frying fish and fries to Quincy Jones and Bill Cosby doing ‘Hicky Burr’.

Among other highlights, there is an unusual and effective serial audio montage of five versions of Sebastián de Yradier’s wistful ‘La Paloma’—a tune recurring throughout the film (like ‘I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow’ in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000))—from an Artie Shaw cover to that of the contemporary Hamburg rock band Bad Boy Boogiez, which reflects a series of changing moods on Nadine’s last night with Zinos in Hamburg before she flies to China.

In another scene, two versions of ‘(Ain’t That) Good News’, Sam Cooke’s swinging into to a live cover by Bad Boy Boogiez, takes ownership of the music in the way that local Dublin soul group did in The Commitments (1991). It does this in the sense that it makes the music a living local thing, not just more canned American classic soul music. Bad Boy Boogiez also plays its own original music.

Another interesting dimension is the inclusion of popular Greek rebetiko music—what Greek restaurant would be without it?—but here it morphs into hip hop. 

The story wraps up with Louis Armstrong’s ‘The Creator Has a Master Plan’; the closing credits fire up with the Isley Brothers’ ‘It’s Your Thing’ for the principal cast and crew, and finish cleanly with Jan Delay’s ‘Disko’ for everyone else.

The animated graphics of the closing credits also are of note. Each of the principal cast and crew get a unique ‘poster’, beginning with the film’s dedication to Cem Akin, the director’s brother, and ending with Fatih Akin’s directing credit. The latter is done in black and white in the style of 1970s New York subway graffiti, and then colored as though spray painted. The rest of the cast and crew follow in a more conventional style to a disco beat.

Included with this release is a 35-minute documentary by Suzan Sekerci on the making of the film, in which she interviews Akin, Bousdoukas, Ünel and other members of the cast and crew.