Soul Kitchen

Moritz Bleibtreu, left, and Adam Bousdoukos in “Soul Kitchen,” by the Turkish-German director Fatih Akin.

Spaghetti, spinach and French fries, all smothered in cream sauce: the menu at Soul Kitchen, a decrepit restaurant in a converted warehouse in an industrial section of Hamburg, Germany, may not be to everyone’s palate. But the place attracts a scraggly following of regulars who exit in a huff after its manager, Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos), hires Shayn (Birol Ünel), a snooty culinary prima donna, as its new chef.

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When Shayn scraps the menu to serve dishes with names like Acupuncture Master’s Soup, the place empties. Recently fired from his job at a more upscale restaurant after refusing to honor a customer’s order for hot gazpacho, Shayn is not above spiking desserts with an aphrodisiac made from Honduran tree bark.

The scene in Fatih Akin’s sweet slapstick farce, “Soul Kitchen” (named after the restaurant), in which the patrons go orgiastically berserk while under the bark’s influence, isn’t laugh-out-loud-funny so much as warmly amusing. We’ve seen it before, just as we’ve also seen the mishap at a funeral when, to the mourners’ shock and chagrin, a coffin is dropped, rather than lowered into the ground, and the corpse’s legs are exposed.

What gives these hoary gags some screwball vitality is the skill with which Mr. Akin piles them on willy-nilly in a swiftly edited comedy that never loses its exuberance. This Turkish-German director, who wrote the screenplay with Mr. Bousdoukos, likes all his characters, no matter how eccentric or disreputable. Besides Zinos, who exudes an unquenchable lust for life, they include his crooked brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu), a habitual burglar and gambler on “partial parole” from jail, whom Zinos, against his better judgment, hires at the restaurant; and Zinos’s hard-drinking, chain-smoking waitress, Lucia (Anna Bederke), a squatter in the warehouse, who falls in love with Illias.

Other major characters include Zinos’s friend from grade school, Thomas Neumann (Wotan Wilke Möhring), a crafty real-estate wheeler-dealer who wants to buy Soul Kitchen; and Zinos’s rich, sexy girlfriend, Nadine (Pheline Roggan), who leaves Hamburg for a job in Shanghai. While separated, the two carry on steamy communications via Skype.

Early in the movie, Zinos injures his back as he tries to move a dishwasher. For the rest of the film he hobbles about in varying degrees of comic agony. He eventually ends up in the office of a Turkish “physio-healer” known as Kemal the Bone Cruncher, whose treatment for a herniated disc is a crude variation of a medieval torture rack.

“Soul Kitchen” is really a comic history of the restaurant, which before the film ends changes hands more than once, undergoes multiple renovations and at different moments is a punk-rock club and a soul-music dance club. It is also the story of an embattled fraternal relationship (both Kazantsakis brothers resemble Ringo Starr) whose bond survives Illias’s betrayals.

Its insistent zaniness makes “Soul Kitchen” very different in spirit from Mr. Akin’s two previous films, “Head-On” and “The Edge of Heaven,” which established him as a major European filmmaker. Seriously silly, it evokes the same high-spirited, pan-European multiculturalism in which people of all ages and backgrounds blithely traverse national borders as they aggressively pursue their destinies.

Europe in Mr. Akin’s films, whose stories often hinge on unlikely coincidences and plot contrivances, is a teeming potpourri of oddballs and hustlers. At the moment Zinos finally bestirs himself to fly to Shanghai to be with Nadine, he unexpectedly runs into her at the airport as she is returning from China.

Mr. Akin’s vision of interconnectedness in the global village, while similar to that of a movie like “Babel,” is more casual and lighthearted. You don’t feel pressured to ponder the deeper meaning of the geopolitical puzzle; it’s just a fact of modern life.

SOUL KITCHEN

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Fatih Akin; written by Mr. Akin and Adam Bousdoukos; director of photography, Rainer Klausmann; edited by Andrew Bird; production designer, Tamo Kunz; costumes by Katrin Aschendorf; produced by Ann-Kristin Homann, Mr. Akin and Klaus Maeck; released by IFC Films. In German and Greek, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Adam Bousdoukos (Zinos Kazantsakis), Moritz Bleibtreu (Illias Kazantsakis), Birol Ünel (Shayn Weiss), Anna Bederke (Lucia Faust), Pheline Roggan (Nadine Krüger), Lucas Gregorowicz (Lutz) and Wotan Wilke Möhring (Thomas Neumann).