Soul Kitchen (2009)

Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen (2009) arrives as a shaggy, good-natured comedy about a Greek chef in Hamburg whose ramshackle tavern is failing, whose girlfriend has decamped to Shanghai, and whose back has given out. The cast is a genuine cross-section of the city: Greek, Turkish, and German actors sharing scenes without a single line drawing attention to the arrangement. That is the film's quiet strength and also the limit of its social program. The immigrant milieu is the water these people swim in. No speech explains it. No lesson is extracted.

The plot does carry a faint whiff of the barricade. Thomas Neumann, the old schoolmate turned real-estate developer, wants to buy the warehouse and redevelop it, and the film treats this as a small villainy. Akin shot in Hamburg-Wilhelmsburg locations under threat of demolition, and the restaurant becomes a stand-in for a neighborhood worth protecting. The sentiment is real, though it never hardens into a manifesto. Neumann is undone by tax fraud, not by a sermon. The women (the bartender Lucia, the therapist Anna, the journalist Nadine) are competent and independent, but the screenplay shows no interest in pressing an argument about gender.

The absences are more telling than the presences. There is no queer thread, no environmental conscience, no meditation on bodies or neurochemistry, no rewriting of the past. This is a contemporary comedy about brothers, loyalty, and rent. It represents a city honestly because that is where the director lives, not because anyone demanded it. It hectors no one. A viewer in search of instruction will have to look elsewhere. We get a decent meal, a decent joke about a stolen deed, and a chef who reads Rimbaud. The classification is unremarkable, and that is the point.