Turkish-German director Fatih Akin returns to one of his key heartland themes, the immigrant underclass experience in contemporary Germany, with his latest feature Rheingold. A lively biopic of Kurdish-German rapper, music mogul and sometime convict Giwar Hajabi, better known by his stage name “Xatar”, this fast-paced raps-to-riches saga is part heist movie, part coming-of-age drama and part inspirational redemption story. Adapting Hajabi’s own 2015 autobiography, Akin delivers a polished package, punchy and gritty but light on stylistic flare or strong authorial voice. Perhaps the director is purposely playing safe here, pursuing a more commercially palatable formula than usual after the cool reception afforded his last film, the relentlessly squalid serial killer biopic The Golden Glove (2019),
Following its world premiere at FilmFest Hamburg last week, Rheingold will next screen at Rome film festival, with domestic theatrical release scheduled for October 27. It should do brisk business in Germany at least, where Xatar is a chart-topping household name and bad-boy folk hero. In other markets, the film’s niche audience appeal will be driven more by Akin’s prestigious, prize-winning track record.
Hajabi certainly has a great back story, even allowing for some fanciful embroidery and myth-making in the mix. His father is a celebrated Kurdish composer and conductor who fled Iran for Iraq with his family after the 1979 Islamic revolution, only to suffer further persecution and imprisonment under Saddam Hussein. In 1981, if Akin’s face-value reading of Hajabi’s memoir can be trusted, he is born in a cave full of bats on the edge of a Kurdish freedom fighter camp during heavy aerial attack. The family then become refugees in Europe, passing through Paris before settling in Bonn, where Hajabi Senior finds work as a music professor.
Rheingold depicts the divorce of Hajabi’s parents as a crucial turning point for the troubled teenager (Ilyes Raoul). He assumes the role of man of the house around the same time he discovers gangsta rap, starts making money selling drugs and bootleg porn films, and learns to defends himself in increasingly brutal street brawls. Even before he leaves high school, he serves his first sentence in a juvenile detention centre.
As he enters adulthood (now played by Emilio Sakraya), Hajabi begins hanging out with heavyweight crime godfathers in Amsterdam, dabbling in cocaine smuggling and gangland feuds. Violence is his main currency, though the film carefully depicts him as an innocent bystander at a brutal murder, which forces him to rethink his life choices and retreat to Germany. Back in Bonn, Hajabi’s dogged attempts to initiate a romance with his former childhood playmate Shirin (Sogol Faghani) meet with repeated rejection, a welcome flicker of sparky female defiance in a testosterone-drenched film that mostly celebrates two-fisted machismo with a matter-of-fact, uncritical eye.
The gripping dramatic high point of Rheingold is the central heist sequence, which clearly fires up Akin’s creative juices more than the by-the-numbers biopic sections. After a convoluted set-up involving smuggled bottles of liquid cocaine, ominous gangland debts and farcical meetings with comically grotesque lowlife characters, Hajabi and his cohorts mount a high-risk roadside robbery on a low-security van loaded with dental gold. Their poorly planned mission is pure slapstick, almost sabotaged by heavy traffic and passing police patrols, a sustained exercise in nerve-jangling tension which Akin shoots in a jittery hand-held style reminiscent of Henry Hill’s cocaine-fuelled downfalll in GoodFellas (1990).
The amateurish Hajabi is fingered by the police as a prime suspect in the gold robbery almost immediately. He hides the loot and flees to Iraq, but his bad luck only get worse as he lands in a crowded Syrian prison cell facing threats of torture and blackmail by crooked regime enforcers keen to get their hands on the gold. Extradition back to Germany is followed by a rowdy trial and prison term, which the film depicts as the wake-up call which finally shifts the aspiring rapper from petty criminal to music mogul and self-styled role model for troubled street kids. In fact, the real Xatar had already released his debut album before going to jail, but this lightly tweaked version makes for a neater narrative. Like all the best gangsta rappers, Akin recognises that poetic hyperbole works better than prosaic reality.
Rheingold sweetens and simplifies other aspects of Hajabi’s life story for public consumption too. Sakraya, for example, is inevitably much more of a handsome charmer on screen than the real Xatar. But at its best, Akin’s brash hip-hop street opera is a broadly positive celebration of the immigrant work ethic, and a rich snapshot of contemporary German pop culture. Hajabi himself provides much of the rap-heavy soundtrack, elegantly juxtaposed with fragrant bursts of Wagner, a recurring leitmotif echoed in the film’s punning title and reinforced with a bravura final sequence, which moves the film briefly into heightened fantasy.
Director, screenwriter: Fatih Akin
Cast: Emilio Sakraya, Mona Prizad, Kardo Razzazi, Ilyes Raoul, Sogol Faghani, Hüseyin Top, Arman Kashani
Cinematography: Rainer Klaussman
Editing: Andrew Bird
Producers: Nurhan Sekerci-Porst, Fatih Akin, Herman Weigel
Production design: Tim Pannen
Music: Giwar “Xatar” Hajabi
Production companies: Bombero International (Germany), Warner Brothers Entertainment GmbH (Germany), Palosanto Film (Italy), RAI Cinema (Italy), Lemming Film (Netherlands)
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Hamburg Film Festival
In German, Kurdish, Turkish, French, English
138 minutes
