Conspicuously absent from the fall festival circuit, Fatih Akin’s Rhinegold bowed at the Filmfest Hamburg back in October 2022, and is only now getting a theatrical release in the States. The absence, as it turns out, is less a case of programmer oversight or nefarious politicking than it is an attestation to the film’s underlying mediocrity. As a biopic of the Kurdish-German rapper Xatar, Rhinegold cobbles together a tonal mish-mash of genre, affect, and character, combining heist thriller with the vicissitudes of geopolitics and urban society. But what it makes up for in range and an extended runtime, it loses in substance: the facts of the story have a narrativized feel about them, and — more critically — are not so much dressed up as they are inserted pell-mell into a swirling narrative simultaneously too wild to be false and too neat to be wholly true. Could this man really have lost half a million in liquid cocaine to broken glass and a downpour, only to try to make it up by pulling off a gold robbery?
Xatar, whose real name is Giwar Hajabi, is played by Emilio Sakraya, who brings to the adult role a hardened, cocky charm. (Two other actors play his child and teenage selves.) Known better for his contributions to German hip hop and his entrepreneurial career, Xatar (his street name derived from the Arabic word for “danger”) nonetheless finds his earlier years the main subject of Akin’s screenplay. Beginning in medias res in a Syrian prison, sometime in 2010, Rhinegold quickly brings us up to speed on things: a Kurdish officer expresses sympathy and offers Xatar diplomatic immunity from German prosecution, in exchange for the whereabouts of “the gold.” When Xatar professes ignorance, he’s tortured and the only gold he claims to be in possession of — a tooth filling — brutally extracted. But the journey from the gangster-turned-musician’s birth (a communist enclave in post-revolution Iran, and then an Iraqi prison) to the sordid mess he’s found himself in is long and winding. Having settled first in Paris, then Bonn, the Hajabi family suffer a reversal of fortune when Xatar’s father, a composer and music professor, leaves them for another woman. This, Akin suggests, is a catalyst for most, if not all, of the teenager’s burgeoning restlessness and troubles with the law.
Amid financial strain (his mother toils to provide him with piano lessons) and bad influence (the kids around the block start gangs and sell weed), Xatar struggles to find his place. When he’s badly jumped after a weed deal gone wrong, he takes up boxing and pummels his aggressors till they’re bloody and beaten. He takes a liking to his Persian neighbor Shirin (Sogol Faghani), who can barely stand the sight of this violent and uncouth goon. After trying, but failing, to conquer both the hip hop and crime scene, Xatar flees to the Netherlands, away from mediocrity and determined to enroll in a music conservatory to study business. But his side hustles — first as a bouncer, then as an associate to a crime syndicate — catch up to his drive to go clean; one thing leads to another and, before long, he’s back in Bonn, having hitched up a plan to plunder a shipment of gold that’s been melted down from the dental fillings of the city’s recently deceased. As the film’s opening suggests, it doesn’t go down well.
There’s an exhilarating current in Rhinegold that palpates with an openness to redemption and a knack for dramatizing, if not explicitly glorifying, a life led loosely and against the backdrop of post-reunification Germany. It explains the film’s widespread mainstream appeal — to date, it’s Akın’s most popular feature — and valiantly exonerates the narrative from charges of boredom or excessive reflexivity. But in doing so, Akin has made a pedestrian and generally forgettable assemblage of cutscenes and volleys that teases the possibility of deeper engagement with Xatar’s personality, only to withhold it from materializing as with the broader implications of disenfranchisement, whether under Khomeini or the euro. The director’s previous film, 2019’s The Golden Glove, took a hard, unflinching look at the life and psychology of serial killer Fritz Honka; criticism of it centered largely around its virulent excess. With Rhinegold, the opposite inheres. Cribbed from one of Richard Wagner’s sublime operas, its title (as well as the mythic treasure used as misplaced metaphor in the film) overstates the power and pathos of its story. Bookending Xatar’s musical career as its denouement only proves its sensationalist point.
DIRECTOR: Fatih Akin; CAST: Emilio Sakraya, Kardo Razzazi, Mona Pirzad, Jesse Albert; DISTRIBUTOR: Strand Releasing; IN THEATERS: July 26; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 18 min.
