Review of the film “Das Rheingold” by Fatih Akin

The film by one of the best European directors, German-Turk Fatih Akin, “Rheingold” is in theaters. The authorized biography of Givar Hajabi, known as the gangsta rapper Xatar (which means “dangerous” in Kurdish), captivated with its genre freedom Mikhail Trofimenkov, despite his indifference to rap and aversion to street punks.

Fatih Akin, starting with the film “Quickly and Without Pain” (1998), depicts the immigrant diaspora of Germany, where representatives of such seemingly organically hostile communities as Greeks, Turks, Serbs, Kurds are fused into a single and, yes, more or less criminal a nation of outcasts. Akin seems to shrug his shoulders: it just happened, life is a bitch, what can you do. But this “shrug” is always impeccably aesthetically executed. Akin masterfully uses all possible emotional registers, moving from tragedy to irony, from despair to burlesque. And he also sincerely despises his adopted homeland Germany: this contempt for the country of sausage burghers resulted in his most evil, most terrible and most burlesque film, “The Golden Glove” (2019) about the wretched serial killer Fritz Honke, who dismembered those even more wretched than him, Hamburg prostitutes.

“Das Rheingold” is also more than skeptical in relation not to modern Germany, but to German culture in general and the work of Richard Wagner in particular. In the finale, surreal mermaids will appear on the screen, guarding not mystical gold, as in Wagner’s opera, but quite concrete gold. More precisely, dental crowns melted into gold bars, taken from the dead, stolen by Xathar’s gang, and drowned by him somewhere in mythological waters. The dental topic cannot help but recall Hitler’s death camps, but European critics did not notice this brazen attack by Akin.

Xatar stands out from the legion of boorish readers of obscene street poetry only in that his first album was released in the spring of 2012, when he was serving an eight-year sentence for that very raid on a cash-in-transit vehicle. Honor and praise to him for the ingenuity with which he recorded tracks from the prison. Yes, he is generally an exemplary rogue.

“Das Rheingold” is reminiscent of Vladimir Basov’s forgotten masterpiece “Return to Life” (1971), based on the fate of the Estonian boy Ahto Levi. The cruel rut of the 20th century threw him from the Hitler Youth to Berlin taverns, where he soulfully sang a song about how “the birds are coming home.” From the gangs of the “forest brothers” to the criminal underground. From the Kolyma camps to the authors of the bestseller “Notes of a Gray Wolf.”

In exactly the same way, historical fate throws Guivard, really leaving him, like Levi, no choice of life path. The scenery of the era is different, but the cruelty is almost worse than in the 1940s. Guivar is the son of refined Iranian intellectuals, a famous composer and an oboist. But when the Islamic revolution occurs, the ayatollahs burst into the concert hall – a burlesque but vivid exaggeration – firing machine guns. Givar is born to the accompaniment of bomb attacks in a cave shelter in Kurdistan, where his parents are fighting in the ranks of communist guerrillas. And the first and most important thing he remembers in his life is the dungeons, prisons of the whole world from Iraq to Germany.

Refugee shelters in France and nightclubs in Amsterdam. Street fights for life and death and study at the conservatory. Reverence for the performance of Das Rheingold at the Bonn Opera and the sale of porn videos for the Bonn boys. Torture in a Syrian prison and awkward advances towards the beautiful dressing room attendant Shirin, who, it would seem, had seen such a freak in a coffin, but by chance fell in love with the charismatic.

World cinema, perhaps, has not seen anything better than the criminal misadventures of Guivard since the best times of Quentin Tarantino. Good-looking Kurdish intellectuals who don’t reach into their pockets for a gun, and African-American scumbags whose mere appearance makes the boss of the Amsterdam nightlife stutter. An idiotic accident in which Guivard and his comrades break half a million euro worth of bottles of magical liquid cocaine, which crystallizes into a drinkable powder. Equally idiotic is the behavior of collectors mistaking Kurdish bandits for a police patrol. And the equally idiotic behavior of a real patrol that found itself at a criminal rendezvous.

In a word, Fatih Akin, like Vladimir Basov in his time, shot a magnificent picaresque novel about a boy spinning like a frying pan just to survive in a raging world. But we must always remember that only one boy out of a hundred thousand succeeds in this.