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.