Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen

"Heimatfilms were noted for their rural settings, sentimental tone and simplistic morality, and centered around love, friendship, family and non-urban life. Also, the polarity between old and young, tradition and progress, rural and urban life was articulated." -Wikipedia

With films like Against the Wall, Crossing the Bridge and The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akin has set a high aesthetic bar at which his newest work inevitably stumbles. Which is not to say that the film is a failure by any means, simply that it must be judged as a minor work in this impressive directors oeuvre.

Set in Hamburg's seedy demi-monde, the film relates the fortunes of the Soul Kitchen restaurant and its unhappy-go-lucky proprietor, with a meat-and-two-veg narrative arc from wretched normality through multiple adversities to a slightly more hopeful normality. And while the restaurant moves up-scale gastronomically the story remains comfort food throughout, providing plenty of opportunities for comic set pieces and tragi-comic misunderstandings.

What we end up with is a patchwork of scenes, connected by a narrative strand that connects property speculation, prostitution, drugs and music. None of it quite makes sense, but this is a film ruled by the heart and not the head. What it lacks in precision it makes up for in warmth.

In general the performances are impressive, and the unavoidable Moritz Bleibtreu (who seems to be compulsory casting in any German film worth its salt) is particularly engaging as the protagonist's jailbird brother, constantly swinging his prayer beads as hustles.

The film's lightness of touch is perhaps its saving grace: the music complements the story without dominating; food and cookery play a subordinate, if enjoyable role, but never do we get too bogged down in the niceties of nouvelle cuisine. And this must be the first major film in which Skype plays such a major role. Product placement perhaps but very realistically done.

As an ironic take on the Heimatfilm, the interplay of cultures - Greek, Turkish, German, whatever - is handled in a no-nonsense workmanlike way. Perhaps it takes a German of Turkish extraction to do this. My feeling is that other German directors would be more sheepish in their handling of these issues.

In conclusion I'd say that the film is good, not great, and shows that Fatih Akin can also make a gentle, feel-good comedy without compromising his higher aesthetic achievements.

Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński

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Shah of Shahs (Penguin Modern Classics)
by Ryszard Kapuściński

From the cover you would believe that Shah of Shahs tells the story of Mohammed Reza, the last Shah of Iran. But in fact the destiny of this cruel, hapless and slightly silly habitué of Swiss ski resorts is only part of the picture.
Rather, Kapuściński's theme here, as in The Emperor before it, is not the person but the ecosystem of repression that keeps a dictator in power. In the Shah's case it was the villainous secret police, known as Savak, that shored up his throne with a rule of terror that in Kapuściński's description makes Stalin's Russia sound like a walk in the park.
Eventually the Iranian people turned on their oppressors in a bloody revolution that was powered by self-sacrifice and martyrs' blood. Here too, Kapuściński is riveting in tracing the moment at which inner resistance turns to outward defiance, leading with ever greater urgency to the ultimate overthrow and ejection of an unloved monarch. But in this the Shah is no more present than any other member of the crowd. He is, rather, a cipher in military gear, a puppet cut loose and greying at the temples.
In his work as a reporter for the Polish news agency, Kapuściński witnessed dozens of coups and revolutions. The Iranian revolution is described in a series of meditations, interviews, reportage and diary sketches that communicate both the tension and the feeling of emptiness that followed the elation of overthrow.
Once the Shah left, the "good" revolutionaries, who wanted democracy and toleration, were quickly removed by a group of "ignorant bearded thugs", Kapuściński tells us, calling to mind Yeats's dictum that "the best lack all conviction while the worst are filled with passionate intensity". And thus Iran"s current leadership was born.
To my mind Kapuściński is one of the twentieth century's great writers in any genre; indeed, genre is something it's difficult to pin on him. Too profound for travel writing, too poetic for politics, too political for belles lettres, and too playful for sociology, he stands above the common fray. If you're interested in dicovering his world, this book would be a fitting beginning.

In Memoriam J.G. Ballard

This is a post that has been waiting unfinished for weeks. Although Ballard died two months ago now, I still want to pay my respects and maybe turn someone onto his amazing writing which was so much more than the Empire of the Sun...


J.G. Ballard was a writer who dealt in dystopias, dreams (mainly nightmares), disorders (mainly mental and sexual) and drugs. At the same time he was a family man who raised two daughters alone, spoke with a plummy accent and never let anything more adventurous than whisky and soda past his lips.

By the time he died on 19 April 2009, Ballard had published 19 novels, a dozen or so short story collections and countless other pieces. Even in the last months of his life he continued to write, producing a book on the cancer which was killing him called Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any, of Life.

I first came to Ballard in my early teens, attracted by the shocking titles (example: "The Asassination of President Kennedy considered as a downhill car-race", "Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan") and the eerie, moody atmosphere of the work: perfect for a teenager.

I remember particularly the wonderful, crepuscular atmospheres of the collection Vermilion Sands, short stories set in a world that has stopped turning, and in which what remains of humanity inhabits a narrow, twilit strip of desert, plundering abandoned supermarkets for strange, luxurious provender and lost in lonely reverie. What this stuff said to a confused fifteen-year-old I can no longer accurately say: but it affected me deeply and helped to mould an aesthetic that still haunts me.

The early novels are also electrifying in their strangeness, their unconditional embrace of the other. Take The Drowned World, with its poetic descriptions of a London utterly submerged, or The Crystal World, with its too-literal fantasy of everything turning to rubies, diamonds and emeralds.

But despite these novels, Ballard was largely ignored by a literary community obsessed by novels of society and manners, neither of which figured greatly in Ballard's work. Where they did, they were indicators of an inner sickness or mental aberration: the calm smooth surface of a society was for Ballard like a glass motorway barrier dulling and attenuating the whoosh and the roar of unleashed humanity, as shown in novels like High Rise, Crash or the later Cocaine Nights and Super Cannes.

Finally though I just wanted to register my appreciation and wonder for the body of work that Ballard produced. To explain and describe each book would take longer than this occasional blogger can handle, but I'd like to give a personal list of favourites, my recommended reading:

Novels:

The Drowned World
The drought
Hello America
Super Cannes: A Novel
Unlimited Dream Company
High Rise
Crash
The Atrocity Exhibition
Empire of the Sun

Short stories

Vermilion Sands
The Voices Of Time
Low flying Aircraft and Other Stories
Myths of the near future

The other Athens

I think that most people have already seen enough pictures of the Acropolis, Temple of Zeus and so on, but when do you get to see the other side of Athens, from the really scuzzy to the frankly strange? Is Greece the only country where they sell shoes (not medical footware, mind you) in pharmacies?

From Athens April 2009

From Athens April 2009

From Athens April 2009

From Athens April 2009

Are you sitting comfortably?

High above Athens stands the Church of Agios Isidorou. From here, sitting on benches that form a horseshoe of seating around the diminutive church, you can look down on the breathtaking spread of the city, born of the unfortunate union of reinforced concrete with laissez-faire urban planning.

As you sit, you can also enjoy amusingly phrased signs like this one, attached to the back of the pole that holds up the strings of fairy lights that illuminate the church at night. It says: "Peak hours may necessitate that you let other people sit on your lap."
Get set for peace, love and understanding.

Two suns fail to dazzle

Is it just me? All over the web people are blogging the praises of the second Bat for Lashes record, Two Suns. I rather like it too, but I feel that reviewers are going a bit overboard with their praise (e.g. Pitchfork).
It's a very pleasant record with some strong songs, and Natasha Khan has a great voice. Everything here is going in the right direction. But overall I find it rather too slight, rather too conventional for all the praise it's getting. It's good, yes. But not great.

A comparison with one of my favourite recent albums, Under Byen's 2007 LP Samme Stof Som Stof, is perhaps instructive. Here we see a band that have truly mastered their medium (through 15 years of hard work), and for whom conventions are not restrictions but toys to be played with or ignored as required. Natasha Khan is on the right track and definitely a talent to watch for the future. And that's the good news: this album might be good, but the next one can only be better.

Bat for Lashes will play at the Kulturkirche in Cologne on 18 May
View event info on last.fm

The real Ras Tafari

The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński

Rating: 3 of 5 stars
I suppose that I have been spoilt by Ryszard Kapuściński in the past, but while The Emperor is certainly a fine piece of writing it doesn't reach his usually high standards.

Perhaps it's in the very nature of the exercise, for The Emperor is a book of reminiscences, retelling the last days of Haile Selaisse's rule in Ethiopia, from the perspective of mainly minor officials and servants.

The result is a book of peculiarly matt surfaces and vague description. For me the palace, with its lackeys, its fawning "notables" and horrid, grabbing dignitaries never really comes alive, mediated as it is by the memories of feeble, defeated men.

So while I can't recommend the book unconditionally in terms of style or as a good example of Kapuściński's art (he simply isn't present enough here), I can certainly recommend it as a study in the morally degenerative effects of power. So if you're looking for a good primer on how to become morally degenerate once you have attained absolute power, this might be a good place to start.

View all my reviews on goodreads.