FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Fatih Akin - Kurz und schmerzlos 

Fatih Akin's film loves the big pathos, the big bang! It is possible that nothing good will ever happen to his characters. No matter what decisions they make or what they can do for each other. There is this wedding scene in short and painless - but it has only the value of a manure party - because we are already in the mechanism of self-destruction. What is starting here is a downward spiral. The story is told by three friends from Hamburg-Altona. From the Turk Gabriel, the Serb Bobby and from Costa, the Greek. Gabriel (Mehmet Kurtulus) just got out of prison and meets his friends Bobby (Aleksandar Jovanovi) and Costa (Adam Bousdoukos) at a wedding. Costa wears the wrong clothes, but Gabriel can "vouch" for him. Finally Costa gets a real suit from Gabriel's sister Ceyda. Actually, Costa is her boyfriend, but at the loo she confesses to a friend that she already has a new one. While the wedding is in full swing, the three friends go to the harbour and treat Gabriel to a whore after his abstinence. A great start, which reminds much less of German than of American films! Fatih Akin knows the models of Italian-American cinema and now transfers them to his own. In interviews Akin always emphasizes that he sees himself as a Turkish director. His influences are the videos from Turkey, which he loved so much as a child. It's the details in his gangster film that remind us of that. We now see the three friends returning to the wedding. The bride is put banknotes on her dress and the boys sit down together at a table. Bobby's bragging about hiring in the Albanian mafia. He tries to persuade Gabriel, but he doesn't want to do anything illegal anymore. Before they go on the dance floor, there's a snapshot of the three. Akin relies on fast cuts and ever darker images. His camera is very close to the action, the dialogues are accompanied by hip hop. Of course, the three friends belong to an urban generation and films like Kurz und schmerzlos demonstrate how koonsequent they make their mistakes. What Akin's characters are doing wrong, he might want to save us from. Akin has found credible actors for it and is determined to drive his story to a logical and comprehensible finale - no compromise in which it could still somehow turn out well for each of them...