"The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes..."

It's oftentimes we're too preoccupied with carving out our own particular niches in life, going through the protocol of life, to realize that the point of life is actual living. Each day is a series of exchanges, business and otherwise--signed contracts, verbal agreements, shook hands.  We set aside one group of priorities for others.  For Zinos Kazantsakis, it seems as if that is all he does in Fatih Akin's Soul Kitchen.

The film is Akin's follow-up to his more serious and more tragic, The Edge of Heaven--and what that film had in heaviness, this one has in levity.  It's not that the situations he puts his characters in aren't difficult, it's just that they we never get the feeling that they're particularly dire.

Zinos is the owner/cook of a popular Hamburg dive, also called Soul Kitchen.  Every relationship he has seems as if it is under contract. His brother, Illia, is essentially on a partial work leave from jail and needs a job (or at least the appearance of one) as part of his probation.  He is a small-time crook--a hustler basically--who can't be bothered to do actual work, so his brother signs a release claiming he is an employee of the restaurant.  His girlfriend, Nadine, is a journalist leaving on assignment to Shanghai who tries to negotiate his relocation to China with her.  He hires a recently-fired chef, only to find out that his new cook wants to completely throw out his diner food for a more refined and highbrow menu--to the dismay of all the regular patrons.  He runs into an old classmate who buys up local property and turns it into nightclubs.  Of course, he wants to buy the building housing Soul Kitchen from Zinos.

But all these separate things pulling at Zinos is handled with such a deft hand and light touch, giving the film energy and life.  There is a wit and warmth to the performances, from Zinos all the way down to the peripheral characters, including an old man who rents (although never actually pays for) a space in the same building and one of his waiters who uses the restaurant--rent free--for his band's practices before open hours.  There's also the great, propulsive soul music populating the soundtrack.  And the food cooked is regarded both from the side of craft and artistry as well as a sensation to be experienced. It's a shame though because certain plot developments involving the old friend buying his property are both obvious and uninteresting.  And with it the film uneasily splits the difference between hilarious farce (a running gag dealing with Zinos's back pain is laugh-out-loud funny at times) and cheesy, awkward humor and pathos.

Soul Kitchen, then, is less than the sum of its parts.  But the good outweigh the bad here in spades and the ride is a thorough blast.  It's difficult not to smile at a film filled with this much bonhomie and goodwill not only towards it's characters, but also to us.