There's an unwritten rule in 'food' movies that life involves chaos. As it was with Babette's Feast, with Chocolat and certainly Fat Pizza (if less elegantly than other contenders), so it is with Soul Kitchen in which Zinos, a long suffering and wildly disorganised restaurateur, gets more than he pays for after hiring a renegade chef plus his larcenous brother Illias, a small-time crook on day-release from jail.
If you fell for Akin's festival-favoured features like the sublime Head On or The Edge of Heaven, this all comes as something of a shock. In returning to his native Hamburg, and the chaotic nature of his earlier films, Akin plunges audiences into a self-described 'audacious, dirty' world of grimy drifters and derelict neighbourhoods. Gone is the epic grandeur and muted landscapes that defined his recent work. This is northern exposure, Euro-style.
And there's a lot to like. Bousdoukos leads with an appealing, floppy-haired goofiness; Bleibtreu (The Baader-Meinhoff Complex) inhabits his no-good brother with easy charm. And once Zinos’ absent girlfriend calls, and Illias is outwitted by unruly developers, order all but collapses and chaos, dutifully, fills the vacuum – providing both actors with plenty of scope. Which is not to say Soul Kitchen is overwhelmed by Latin looniness, Fatih is more considered in his approach, more akin (if you’ll pardon the pun) to Kaurismaki than early Almodovar.
Nonetheless, he and co-writer/star Bousdoukos adopt a discordant tone that is not always satisfying, one that leaves large chunks of narrative disconnected from the main story. It’s as if the internal chaos has boiled over into the production. Some characters lack a certain tanginess that leave them under-developed, others all but disappear. Come the film’s last third, much of the earlier, good work visibly unravels. Soul Kitchen is a likeable dish certainly, but not the signature creation one might expect from Akin.
// COLIN FRASER
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