One of the few intriguing elements of Fatih Akin’s biopic of the Kurdish-German rapper and media star Giwar Hajabi (professional moniker Xatar) is the title. The composite word comes up when Hajabi, as a child, accompanies his composer-conductor father to a performance of the similarly named opera in Bonn, shortly after his refugee family has arrived from Iran via Iraq and Paris. Das Rheingold is the first of Wagner’s four works addressing German culture’s mythological origin story, and the scene sets the stage for Hajabi’s own self-mythologizing impulses (the Rheingold, after all, makes you immortal) as a foreigner gangster who survives by his wits and outsized personality. It also gives Hajabi a credible grounding in both music and outlaw attitude, the former of which is only latently realized.

Moving back-and-forth through Hajabi’s life, the storyline focuses on hard responses to hardship, with the family suffering mightily in exile following the Iranian Revolution before the elder Hajabi secures work in Germany as a musician—and then promptly abandons his wife and children when he meets another woman. Bullied and vilified by other immigrants and ignored by the natives, Giwar (Emilio Sakraya as an adult, Ilyes Moutaoukkil as a teen) sells porn videos in school to augment household finances and becomes a street fighter who can give as good as he gets when he turns to dealing drugs. Akin doesn’t do much to distinguish the various facets of young Hajabi’s life as he falls headlong into a life of crime that leads him to an expat mob headquartered in Amsterdam who sees his potential and puts him to work. One botched job leads to another and Giwar goes on the lam for stealing a shipment of gold (Aha!), forcing him to hide out in Syria where he’s picked up by local military who torture him to find out where the precious metal is stashed. Because Akin doesn’t follow this portion of Hajabi’s life in a linear fashion it lacks the urgency you expect from stories about criminals caught up in their own miscalculations, and it’s difficult to understand exactly how Hajabi ends up back in Germany in prison. But that’s where he takes up hip-hop as a vocation after having only dabbled in it previously.

Akin borrows what he needs from the canon—a bit of Scarface here, some Tupac music video style there; a lot of Scorsese—but the total package never finds a purchase on the imagination and feels generic as a tale of personal triumph. It doesn’t even register as being particularly dangerous, which is odd since Xatar is a very controversial artist in Germany. In the movie, he’s just another flattened-out example immigrant success. 

In German, Kurdish, English, Dutch, Turkish and Arabic. Opens March 29 in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (0570-6875-5280).

Rheingold home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2022 bombero International GmbH & Co. KG/Palosanto Films Srl/Rai Cinema S.p.A./Lemming Film/corazon international GmbH & Co. KG/Warner Bros. Entertainment GmbH