In the wake of the horrors of 9/11, America’s war on terrorism generated its own horror stories, many of which involved torture and grave human rights abuses. Often these were channeled into cruelty towards terrorist suspects in lock-the-door-and-throw-away-the-key prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, among whose inmates there were undoubtedly also innocent people swept up in roundups. Paul Schrader’s The Card Player flashed back to torture in Abu Ghraib; Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush by German director Andreas Dresen, instead, recounts a true story about an innocent 19-year-old who, during a trip to Pakistan, is captured (actually bought) by U.S. forces and ends up in Guantanamo.
The film, however, focuses on a different drama: the ceaseless efforts of the boy’s mother and a selfless human rights lawyer to fight for his freedom. The two are a study in contrasts, which Dressen and the screenwriter Laila Stieler fully exploit in a debatable attempt to inject comedy into a dramatic situation which is anything but humorous.
The mother in question is the formidable Rabiye Kurnaz, a middle-class Turkish hausfrau whose family members live a comfortable life as resident aliens in Bremen, where her husband works for a car manufacturer. In an indelible, over-the-top performance, singer and comedienne Meltem Kaptan plays her as a big-hearted woman in an oversize body with masses of long blond curls. Her tightly knit family includes her younger sister (Sevda Polat, very good) and three sons, the love of her life. In a revealing scene, she admits she has never been in love: she married to have children and a family. When one day she discovers her elder son Murat is missing, it triggers her worst nightmare.
Somehow she gets the address of a human rights law firm, where she hooks the wiry, bike-riding intellectual Bernhard Docke as defender of her son. As the idealistic lawyer who takes the case to see justice down and constitutional democracy defended against all odds, subtle actor Alexander Scheer manages to keep him from becoming a caricature in a nimble performance.
Rabiye defies all stereotypes. She drives her flashy convertible too fast for him and gets distracted by anything like children, food or house plants that crosses her path. Over the course of the two-hour film, this odd couple have their hopes raised and dashed again and again, becoming friends in the process. While Bernhard pushes through a class action lawsuit against the U.S. government, Rabiye runs after ministers and gets the runaround from bureaucrats. The casual mixing of Erin Brockovich-style legal confrontations and broad family comedy becomes very tiresome after a while, though it may play better outside festivals.
One gets the feeling the choice of the actress dictated many of the warm and fuzzy human moments that Kaptan excels in as she navigates Rabiye’s difficult journey, which takes her away from her beloved family all the way to Washington (twice). And without Kaptan, the film would surely have been dull and predictable, an exercise in political cinema of the most familiar kind. Still one wishes some of the flippancy and facile jokes could have been saved for another day.
There are still prisoners being held indefinitely in the Guantanamo military detention camp, so for those who don’t know Rabiye’s story, the outcome is not a foregone conclusion. Dresen and Stieler, who worked together on award-winning films like Cloud 9, Willenbrock and Gundermann (in which Scheer also starred) avoid telegraphing the ending, which concludes the story on a note of satisfying ambiguity.
Director: Andreas Dresen
Screenplay: Laila Stieler
Cast: Meltem Kaptan, Alexander Scheer, Charly Hubner, Nazmi Kirik, Sevda Polat, Safak Sengul, Abdullah Emre Öztürk
Producers: Claudia Steffen, Christoph Friedel
Executive producer/producers:
Cinematography: Andreas Hofer
Production design: Susanne Hopf
Costume design: Birgitt Kilian
Editing: Jorg Hauschild
Music: Johannes Repka, Cenk Erdogan
Sound: Peter Schmidt
Production companies: Pandora Film Produktion (Germany) in association with Iskremas Filmproduktion (Germany), Cinema Defacto (France)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In German, Turkish, English
119 minutes
