Fatih Akin about Xatar, gangster, rapper and businessman
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An authorized biopic of the German rapper Xathar, who recorded his most famous album in prison, where he was sent for robbing a truck with gold, is being released. The film about a gangsta poet who made money as a bouncer, drug courier and porn seller was directed by one of the most famous and talented German directors, Fatih Akin. This may not be a great breakthrough for him, but it’s certainly not the worst entertainment for more than two hours.
In the spring of 2012, a gangsta rap album by a brutal man under the stage name Xatar (from Kurdish this word roughly translates as “dangerous”) found its way onto the German music charts. Overall, nothing special – assertive, rhythmic music with offensive autobiographical lyrics. What really distinguished this album from dozens of other new products of German hip-hop was the fact that the record was produced partly in places not so remote; Xatar read the lyrics on a voice recorder brought into prison against the rules. The author of the album, German Kurdish Guivar Khadjabi, received a seven-year sentence for armed robbery: together with his accomplices, he stopped an inconspicuous truck transporting unaccounted for gold in the form of gold crowns taken from the dead – the total amount of the loot was estimated by the court at almost €2 million. Khadjabi was put in the dock not an easy way – the fugitive was handed over to the German authorities by the Syrians, and in 2014 he was released at the zenith of his fame – already the owner of a successful music label, a hookah bar, a clothing brand, and a tobacco brand. But this is all a biography (by the way, it also turned into a very successful book; it was not for nothing that the Die Zeit newspaper at one point called Khadjabi a “hype machine”), but what about the cinematography?
Fatih Akin – who is no stranger to telling the stories of street bandits, migrant workers and migrants (“Head on the Wall”, “Solino”, “Soul Kitchen”) – begins “Das Rheingold” from afar, even before the birth of his hero in 1980. When Akin began writing the life story of Khajabi, the rapper himself was not yet forty, but the film is still an odyssey, a real history textbook, which fits a lot: here is the Iranian revolution, and the war in Kurdistan, and the Iraqi dungeons (the first, but in full formative memory of Khajabi), and flight to Europe, where our hero’s parents will have to rebuild their lives. Khajabi grew up on the mean streets of Bonn in the roaring nineties, and the boxing section gave him little more than piano lessons. Akin, who at the same time began making his own street films (“Quickly and Without Pain”, 1998), is familiar with this type; he is closer and more understandable to him than the maniac from “Golden Glove”, so there are fewer questions about motivations and Khajabi is not distinguished by a particularly subtle character study. And for the modern Russian viewer, the fate of young Khadjabi may be reminiscent of the plot of “A Boy’s Word”: the talented son of intelligent parents, between solfeggio and harmony lessons, inexorably rolls downhill, selling porn and drugs, and only in the resulting part does a miracle occur, for which the German state is worth thanking, decided that it would be calmer and safer for citizen Khajabi to serve his well-deserved sentence not in a Syrian, but in a German prison.
Perhaps, from an educational point of view, Das Rheingold is a complete failure. It is not customary to reward such a main character with a happy ending. What example will Fatih Akin’s film set for the younger generation? Doubtful. But people rarely go to the movies for edification. In this sense, it would be much more useful to limit ourselves to social networks and look at the real Khajabi, filmed ten years ago in neat European dungeons by Vice journalists. People go to the movies for impressions – for chases accompanied by calloused rap, for fights and heroes that, most likely (and thank God!), you will not meet in real life. The movie wouldn’t be a movie if it didn’t find a performer with a certain charisma to interpret the gangsta rapper on screen. The shaven-headed Emilio Sakraya does everything to prevent the viewer from accidentally dozing off during this not-so-boring film, but a two-and-a-half-hour film. Fatih Akin also tries, entertaining either with a structure in the manner of Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” or with stories about Richard Wagner’s “Das Rheingold.” I would like to believe that after this rap biography they will buy tickets to the opera house, but Akinu Wagner is needed to get on the trail of the protagonist’s father, conductor and composer Eghbal Hajabi. According to the film, it is the conflict with his father who survived torture and emigration that pushes the hero from the piano onto the street. And turns the music into that very gold, lost at the beginning and found closer to the end, which in a certain sense granted Hajabi eternal life.
Of course, there is no need to talk about the final moral rebirth of the hero; here Akin’s Hollywood drama is completely stumbling. The director might have wanted to come up with some kind of somersault that pushed the gangster onto the righteous path, but it didn’t really work out. Fortunately, prison therapy, religion, rap and capitalism worked (it turned out that when you have money, you no longer need to take it away from others). Probably, one could grumble about authenticity if there were no real Khajabi from Bonn, but Khajabi with his hookah bars and rap albums does exist. And once again we have to admit: life is sometimes much more resourceful than cinema.
In theaters from April 11
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