REVIEW: Fatih Akin Returns With Delicious, Exhilarating Soul Kitchen

Sometimes when I feel lost in the darkest thickets of professional moviegoing -- after hacking through, say, a particularly bad patch of uninspired romantic comedies, dunderheaded action movies and twee, manicured indies -- I beg the movie gods for anything that simply looks like a sign of life. But when it comes to the movies of German-Turkish filmmaker Fatih Akin, I've learned I never have to beg.

Akin has made a relatively small handful of movies -- his passionate and bracing 2004 romantic drama Head-On was the first to bring him worldwide attention -- and yet somehow he's poured a lifetime's worth of vitality into that smallish body of work. His latest, Soul Kitchen, is a deceptively light comedy: A German-Greek sort-of chef Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos, who also co-wrote the script with Akin) runs a lively but perhaps only semi-sanitary Hamburg restaurant, satisfying the locals with prefab fish cakes, previously frozen french fries, and other homespun delights that don't look very glamorous but probably taste pretty good.

Zinos has many of the typical restaurateur's problems and some extra ones: He's having trouble paying his bills; his icy-cool girlfriend (Pheline Rogan) is about to leave him for a job in China; and his rakish, unreliable brother Illias (Mauritz Bleibtreu) has suddenly appeared on the scene, on parole from prison, looking to cling to his brother's not-so-sturdy coattails.

Still, Zinos barrels on: He's a heavy-set, bearlike guy with a hearty appetite for work, sex and everything else, though even that is curtailed by bad luck -- he throws his back out and can't move or stand without suffering constant pain. There's more: The tax woman comes by and briskly appropriates the restaurant's sound system; and the health inspector pops in and informs Zinos he has 30 days to get his ramshackle eatery up to code -- an event that follows suspiciously soon after one of Zinos' old schoolmates (Wotan Wilke Möhring), a successful real-estate developer, resurfaces, acting all friendly-like but harboring unsavory hidden motives.

Soul Kitchen is built on the premise that if something can go wrong, it most certainly will, and Akin -- who has said that he made the film as a way of making peace with his youthful past, a crazy whirl of working in restaurants and bars, and as a DJ -- clearly relishes the chance to indulge in all sorts of morose slapstick. From the movie's early shots of Zinos preparing food in the restaurant's kitchen (he slaps potato salad onto the edge of a plate with great gusto, smoothing out some stray smears with a bare finger) to a later scene in which young students from a nearby dance school flock onto the restaurant's impromptu dance floor as if drawn by an invisible magnet (they also indulge in tons of food and drink), Akin finds joy and comfort in the idea of revelry and excess. He recognizes that plain old fun can't solve life's big problems, but it can at least keep pain and suffering temporarily at bay. Music, as the picture's title (also the name of Zinos' restaurant) suggests, doesn't hurt either, and Akin has dotted the movie's soundtrack with Kool and the Gang, Ruth Brown and numerous interpretations of "La Paloma."

In Soul Kitchen, as in Akin's other pictures (his most recent was the searching and vital 2007 "The Edge of Heaven"), people's apartments, their workplaces, their lives are ragged and messy around the edges. There are no easy solutions -- only miraculous ones. Zinos is earthy, generous, cranky: He runs the kind of casual, lively, hang-out joint he'd like to frequent himself, if only he weren't working so hard. Bousdoukos has appeared in several of Akin's movies, and here he gives the kind of rumpled, lived-in performance that's so casual it can't help but ring true. (It doesn't hurt that Bousdoukos also has actually run a restaurant himself.) With his broad, good-natured features, he's sexy in the way tousled bedsheets are. And when Zinos picks up on the possibility of a romance with the charming massage therapist who helps him with his back troubles (played by Dorka Gryllus), you feel a wave of relief that this hardworking, open-hearted guy might finally have some pleasure in his life.

One minor but extremely significant character in Soul Kitchen is the hotshot, hot-headed chef, Shayn (played by the wonderful Birol Ünel, the star of Head-On), who's hired by Zinos after he brazenly quits his job at a tony restaurant. (He strides out of the place so quickly, he doesn't have the presence of mind to retrieve his tools; in one of the movie's lovely fillips, a waitress follows him out of the restaurant with his chef's knife and carefully slips it into the inner pocket of his jacket.) Shayn at first alienates Zinos' customers with his exquisitely balanced dinner plates -- these people like their frozen pizzas, their all-too-white potato salads, their fish sticks. ("Uncultured peasants!" he fumes.) But eventually, they come around, and the fortunes of Zinos's Soul Kitchen begin to turn around -- and then they will turn around yet again. This is a picture whose dance steps are determined by any number of mishaps and misfortunes; like the dance floor of a great club on a good night, it's gorgeous, unruly and exhilarating all at once.