RHINEGOLD - Mark Reviews Movies

Rhinegold, Strand Releasing

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 25, 2024

Unless one already knows the man's story, the life of Giwar Hajabi, more likely known as Xatar, as portrayed in Rhinegold seems to be heading in one inexorable direction. Here's someone who was born amidst violence, as a child of Kurdish parents who became freedom fighters following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and whose first vivid memories are of being in prison, when his family was imprisoned in Iraq and subjected to torture after fleeing their changed homeland. Once a young Giwar gets a taste of the relatively easy money and power of a gangster life, he's in it.

Indeed, things seem dire Giwar, played as an adult by Emilio Sakraya, as soon as we meet him. It's Syria in 2010, and Giwar and his friends have found themselves the detainees of the local military, held in a cramped cell with a few dozen other prisoners and interrogated about some missing gold. When Giwar doesn't answer, that's when the facility's expert torturer is beckoned to get the information Giwar won't provide.

Giwar's whole life comes across as a cycle of prison and violence and never really having a place to call home. If someone told you that the man is now a chart-topping rapper and music producer in Germany, you might think that can't be possible based on this information, and that's part of what makes writer/director Faith Akin's film a compelling story. The ultimate course of Giwar's life seems even more unlikely here, because it's first and foremost a crime drama about a man who basically convinces himself that he has no other path to take.

The music, however, is there for Giwar from the start, too. His parents are musicians before the Revolution and eventually after it, when they finally do arrive in Germany following their time as refugees from two different regimes that oppress those of a Kurdish background. Giwar's mother Rasal (Mona Pirzad) played in an orchestra in Iran, and his father Eghbal (Kardo Razzazi) was a composer of some accomplishment in his homeland and whose reputation follows him wherever he may encounter his fellow Kurds.

As such, Giwar (played as a boy by Baselius Göze and as a teenager by Ilyes Raoul) started learning to play piano at a young age, as soon as the family could count on some safety upon their arrival in Germany. His first teacher is his father, who scolds and insults his son whenever the playing isn't to the man's liking, and to pay for a more patient instructor, Rasal cleans the woman's home while her son practices. Combine that sight with Eghbal abandoning his family after finding some degree of success in Germany, and what is Giwar supposed to do to help his mother and younger sister make ends meet?

The answer comes in the form of assorted and increasingly hazardous hustles, proposed by other teenage boys who will become Giwar's longtime friends. One of those schemes is to make pirated copies of porno videos and sell them to construction workers, but Giwar quickly learns that his adolescent classmates will pay much more for them.

That collapses, leading Giwar to sell marijuana around the neighborhood, but such a plan has its own complications. The law, which eventually catches up to Giwar and makes him a fugitive in Holland, is one, and another is a local gang, which beats the boy mercilessly when one of their own refuses to pay Giwar. As a result, he learns to fight at a local gym and, some time later, meticulously goes after each and every member of the gang who beat him.

Regardless of everything else, Giwar is determined. One can't take that quality from him.

The rest of this story, based on Hajabi/Xatar's autobiography, continues to escalate in terms of the scope and severity of Giwar's hustles and flat-out crimes. After arriving in Amsterdam, he continues to get help from his old friends, such as Samy (Hüseyin Top) and Miran (Arman Kashani), who introduces Giwar to Uncle Yero (Uğur Yücel), a local Kurdish crime boss who retains a calm demeanor even when he shoot a young upstart in his home and orders his men to dispose of the body. Yero likes Giwar, who enrolls in a music conservatory while forcing his way into becoming a bouncer and entrepreneur of club security, but one wrong move or word could change that, for all Giwar knows.

Akin's screenplay is so caught up in the particulars of Giwar's rising involvement in a life of crime, the cutthroat nature of this criminal underworld, and the mistake-filled but finally-lucky heist that makes him a fugitive again that we become convinced that's all there is to this story. Sure, Giwar goes to music school, but he finds the focus on legalese boring. He signs a few rappers and singers to a fledging record label he starts upon returning to Germany, but the money for such an endeavor has to come from somewhere. He only knows one means of attaining it.

Some may wag their fingers at the supposed message of this story. The filmmakers, though, are a step or two ahead of such hollow moralizing, turning some of these schemes into comedies of errors (A gag involving traffic lights is quite funny), making it clear that Giwar's music and business chops are entirely his own, and giving us a firm sense of a man who only does what he thinks he needs to do in order to survive. Along the way, he learns his own lessons and discovers what he actually needs to live—not just survive. In a way, then, Rhinegold is a bold act of misdirection, leading us through a story that's ultimately and surprisingly inspiring, if only because of how truly unlikely it seems.

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