German filmmakers have lately been specialising in slick yarn-spinning wrapped in a thin layer of restrained artistry and radical chic (cf The Edukators, The Lives of Others) that’s made them darlings of the pseudo-art-house crowd. Faith Akin’s follow-up to his Head-On, which I found dull in comparison to its hellraiser reputation, is entertaining and absorbing without at any point taking a real risk. Into its contemporaneous stew of fashionable lefty talking points and the familiar provocations of Euro cinema, it tosses together student lesbians, Islamic fundamentalists, an abusive patriarch, a forlorn ex-hippie mother, and a bleary Kurdish prostitute.
It does sport particularly affecting performances from Hanna Schygulla, Nurgül Yesilçay, and Patrycia Ziolkowska.
Akin churns them together with that everything’s-connected, multi-part jazz we’ve all been getting tired of since Before the Rain (1994) made it the compulsory framework for studying prejudice and strife, etc, with lots of long beatific gazes to suggest transcendence towards the end. Theoretically an incisive portrait of a world filled with boundaries, political, sexual, and religious, to scratch its surface is to find very little of actual commentary on any of these matters, substituting touching familial reunions that remind us that, gosh darn it, we’re all human in the end.
