Soul Kitchen Forum

• Play
• Add to Instant Queue
• Add

It's a little surprising that we don't see more films that revolve around food: it, and the eating of it, is axiomatically one of the central themes of every human life, far more so than love or family or vampires. Which isn't to say that there aren't food-related films, of course, ranging from the excellent ( Ratatouille), the merely OK ( Julie and Julia), and the definitively mediocre ( Chocolat). Fitting itself firmly into the latter category is Soul Kitchen, the latest effort from German director Fatih Akin. To its credit, the film doesn't really stress about being much more than an entertainment, but even so, it falls short of its goals. 

Zinos ( Adam Bousdoukos) is the German-Greek proprietor of the titular Soul Kitchen, a Hamburg restaurant that aspires less to Jacques Pepin than to Sandra Lee: its kitchen is stocked with only the finest frozen foods and store-made confections, the better to serve its easily-satisfied patrons their customary schnitzel and fishsticks. Things change for the restaurant, and for Zinos, when his girlfriend decides to move to Shanghai to pursue her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent, and when he hires the temperamental chef Shayn (who's fired from another restaurant when he refuses to serve hot gazpacho). 

What follows is a cycle of ups and downs that feel somewhat predetermined, involving Zinos' difficulties with his long-distance relationship, his brother's need for a job to extend his daily leave from prison, the tax board, unruly customers who don't care for the new menu, dealing with Shayn's quirks, pressure from real estate developers who want to buy the building his restaurant is in, and perhaps especially his bad back, suffered while moving kitchen equipment. This is, in other words, one of those films that can't satisfy itself with one or two major traumas for its lead character, and instead has to hit him with a Job-like, consistent stream of malignancy.
 

That wouldn't be a problem if it didn't make the movie feel so disorganized, as if Akin couldn't decide whether he wanted it to be a light character study or a more traditional three-act dramatic piece. Perhaps the film's greatest sin is that it's simply not funny: most of the humor is derived from Zinos' bad back, so we're left looking at Bousdoukos (who resembles nothing less than a weird love child of Andrew W.K. and Danzig) making funny walks and clutching at his side at inopportune moments. It's physical humor that is only mildly amusing to begin with, but which wears down in effectiveness over the course of the nearly two-hour running time.  

Compounding the problem of the ineffectual humor is the mostly ineffectual drama. Bousdoukos is fine as Zinos, but his relationship with his girlfriend isn't established enough early in the film to make you really care whether their romance survives or not, and the new romances that spring up for him and his brother feel somewhat unearned, in the “these two people are in the same place at the same time and thus they will fall in love” kind of way. By the time the major issues with the restaurant pop up later in the film, we've seen Zinos escape from so many scrapes and close calls that it's less an issue of whether he'll resolve his problems but when.

 
In Soul Kitchen's defense, it is at least well-directed, and features some great music and some nice montage sequences. It's never offensively bad or boring, by any means, but it seems like one of those movies where someone needed to make a choice about what direction the story would take, and no one stepped up to the plate. It's one of those movies that everyone had a good time making, but it's also a movie that seems to avoid being compelling or heartfelt or funny in favor of simply being zany. It doesn't even succeed on the level of those Amelie-ish confections that are uplifting by sheer virtue of being airy. It's somewhat ironic that a movie called Soul Kitchen fails to have much of a soul itself.

@Rorie: Comedy Dramas seem to work better as television shows. Do you think that maybe this would had worked better as a television show?

I like Andrew WK and Danzig (to a degree). FIVE OUT OF FIVE :|

I've never heard of this movie before and I guess it will stay that way...

i think a two star rating is the worst rating. at least 1 star movies are so bad you can rage about it and laugh at ti with your friends, but a two star? it's just depressing.

 Ratatouille was very under-whelming to me. Boring.

@onemoan_nohorse: I think if I had any problems with Ratatouille was the fact that it was pretty much humor-free. I go into Pixar movies expecting to laugh a bunch, but that one was almost a drama overall. I don't think I laughed at all, but I still enjoyed the story and the way it was told.

@DanGarofalo said:

" I've never heard of this movie before and I guess it will stay that way... "

My exact sentiments.