(2/5)
From the director of “Head On” and “The Edge of Heaven” I was expecting something less obvious than “Soul Kitchen”. The film is a gallery of ethnic stereotypes with a German twist. German-Greek mate Zinos, coming from the lower part of town and with a brother freshly paroling out of prison, has a bottom food-chain restaurant called “Soul Kitchen”. His blond, upper-class fiancee is flying to work in Shanghai but Zinos can’t decide whether to leave the restaurant to follow her or not. From one predictable event to the other, we follow characters without soul in and out of a kitchen. The problem is not the story, but the lack of tension, the absence of passion and the overall feeling of banality.
Only a few scenes express a certain grade of inventiveness and formal research as the scene were the two Greek brothers dance a sirtaki seen through a wideangle. The rest is a gallery of badly shot and poorly edited stereotypes. The blond Nazi-like villain, the secret aphrodisiac ingredient turning a party in an orgies, the gratuitous sex scenes, the fate-persecuted character letting himself go and the miraculous resolution at the end are just some examples of this lack of originality.
The jury prize at the Venice Film Festival in 2009 seems like a bad joke.
Popularity: 3% [?]
