The German Fatih Akin is a director always worthy of interest, with a laudable risk appetite, even if it does not always live up to the expectations created. Despite the fact that almost twenty years have passed since the critical and popular success of the moving ‘Against the Wall’ (2004) and that it is still his best film, the filmmaker continues to premiere regularly in Spain, arousing conflicting positions among specialists and achieving, What is not little, that each film is different from the previous one without losing a kind of authorial stamp.
Since then, his films have been uneven, sometimes unsatisfying, sometimes irritating, other times simply unsuccessful and forgettable. Among them, the ambitious ‘Al otro lado’ (2007), Jury Prize and Best Screenplay at Cannes; the disappointing ‘Soul kitchen’ (2009) and the tricky and ideologically confused ‘In the shadow’ (2017), starring Diane Kruger.
His penultimate adventure, ‘The Monster of St. Pauli’ (2019) was inspired by the true story of Fritz Honka to approach the psychokiller in the form of a grotesque black comedy that did not always land on its feet. Three quarters of the same can be said of ‘Pure gold (Rheingold)‘.
It is not a particularly successful film, certainly interesting, but its portrayal of the life of rapper Xatar in the form of crime tale of fall and redemption manages to escape the mold the typical Hollywood biopic.
‘Pure gold (Rheingold)’ has a good rhythm despite its excessive duration, at times hectic, somewhat tricky, somewhat weighed down by the weight of his ambition and that in the end it ends up betraying itself (in a similar way to ‘En la sombra’?) but suggestive enough to deserve reflection and detailed comment.
That is to say, a work one hundred percent Akinthis author who, above all, must be recognized for his estimable and almost obsessive perseverance in portraying the dirtiest and most uncomfortable face of his country, far from its image as the most powerful power in Europe.
Crudeness, pain and redemption to the rhythm of street rap
‘Pure Gold (Rheingold)’ is assembled from a long flashback which narrates the life of its protagonist until his admission to prison as a result of a failed robbery. This is, without a doubt, the most valuable part of the film. Akin approaches the story of this petty criminal recounting his adventures with an epic aura and a pertinent urgency in which the symbolic also has space.
Akin is careful not to show his anti-hero as someone nice or complicit, eliminating almost all the ties that the viewer can establish with him, love story aside. His episodes possessed by physical and forceful violence are always more interesting., which are reminiscent of the best Van Damme titles, which became part of the “heist movie” conventions. German is not Scorsese; neither is Hanson from ‘8 miles’, from whose model he manages to distance himself based on the crudeness of the images and the codes of the genre.
Talk about criminal as a product of a sick and decadent society (more for a Kurd in Germany in the 1980s), and to do so, he uses the forms and clichés used by so many other filmmakers until they become commonplaces, archetypes and habitual resources: from Howard Hawks to José Antonio de la Loma, from Mervyn LeRoy to Jack Hill, from WS Dyke to Eloy de la Iglesia, from Michael Campus to Peter Medak, from Robert Benton to Gordon Parks Jr, from Michael Karbeinikoff to Sheldon Lettich.
And among all of them, Fatih Akin, with his usual energysometimes moving his pieces by inertia, others with relative success, but always relying too much on the force of his effectiveness.
‘Pure gold (Rhinegold)‘: an anti-establishment ode… or maybe just the opposite
The film, and its protagonist with it, then returns to the prison confinement of Xatar (a convincingly furious emilio sakraya) after unsuccessful attempts to find the gold of the title, which has led him to his cell and in which it is not difficult to find resonances with German culture and mythology. Here Akin seems more hasty and reluctant than ever, more docile to the biopic style book, showing us the redemption of the protagonist behind bars through rap, the happy and predictable conclusion of his love story and his progressive rehabilitation.
Assumes the film, with some embarrassment, its main contradiction: not even because of the discovery of art, a survivor of a corrupt system ends up adapting to it, preferring to look away from its core injustice.
Fatih Akin tries to redeem himself, like Xatar himself, with a final flight to magical realism (with a mermaid included) that shows the obvious of its moral and that, despite trying to hide the main flaws of the film, only manages to make its weaknesses more evident. . However, ‘Pure Gold’ has triumphed at the German box office and has become the biggest success of Akin’s career.