Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A feisty matriarch battles the system alongside an aging idealistic lefty lawyer in order to [fill in topical cause here].
The logline for German docu-drama Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush sounds like something you’ve probably seen on screens big and small hundreds of times before, but nevertheless journeyman director Andreas Dresen gives the rickety old structure a fresh coat of paint.
Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush
The real secret weapon is lead actor Meltem Kaptan, a comedian originally, who brings sharp timing and warmth to the role of Rabiye Kurnaz, a working-class Turkish-German woman who campaigned for five years to get her hapless son Murat released from Guantanamo. Although the issues it raises are still relevant, it’s unlikely Rabiye will go far beyond the German and Turkish film circuits and streamers, but on its home turf it ought to do solid enough business.
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Punctuated throughout by datelines that underscore just how long it took for the real-life version of these events to come to a conclusion, the film starts soon after the 9/11 attacks. In the city of Bremen, a northern German town known for manufacturing and its large immigrant population, Turkish-born Rabiye keeps house for her Mercedes factory-worker husband Mehmet (Nazmi Kirik) and their three sons.
At first, the eldest Murat (Abdullah Emre Ozturk) is offscreen somewhere while Rabiye hangs out with her younger sister Nuriye (Sevda Polat) and deals with the needs of the younger ones, adolescent Cem (played first as an 11-year-old by Ali-Emre Sahin, then later by Mert Dincer) and elementary-school-aged Attila (first Lemi Ogul Tan Ungan, then Devrim Deniz Aslan). The tragedies that just happened in America are little more than noise to the Kurnaz family, salt-of-the-earth community members who are reasonably observant Muslims by Turkish standards. That means that once in a rare while, Rabiye will drink alcohol but her marriage to Mehmet was arranged, as was Murat’s recent marriage to Fadime (Safak Sengul), who is still living back in Turkey.
Suddenly, it becomes clear that Murat is missing, and Rabiye learns that he’d become interested in the teachings of a fundamentalist imam while in Germany and then gone to Pakistan to try and join the fight against American repression abroad. Although he never actually joined any organization, we eventually learn that he was reported to American soldiers by Pakistani police, who collected bounties for every “terrorist” they found, and then tortured in Afghanistan and shipped to the American shady detention camp in Cuba where he was further tortured.
However, the story isn’t really about Murat, who is seen only in home videos the family shot before he left until the end of the movie. It’s about Rabiye, who badgers every authority she can find, from the police to the Turkish foreign minister, in order to get Murat back. It’s a battle she wages mostly alone until she teams up with human rights lawyer Bernhard Docke (Alexander Scheer), a hard-working, high-minded partner in a local firm who has to justify his taking on the case to a disapproving colleague who lost a nephew in the twin towers. Although they’re a classic double act in comedy terms, one spindly and stuffy, the other plump and guileless, they make an effective team as they end up taking the fight all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
Even for viewers who know nothing about Murat’s case, one well-known in Germany and more vaguely in the rest of Europe, it’s pretty clear from the jaunty, David vs. Goliath structure of the screenwriting which way things are going to go. Still, once the details of how unspeakably cruel Murat’s torture was — heralded by a famous photograph from Abu Ghraib — the film struggles a bit to reconcile those horrors with the chuckles it seeks to generate about Rabiye’s crazy driving and inability to spot who is famous and who’s not at Washington, D.C., cocktail parties. It’s possible the mismatch plays a little better if you speak German; comedy is always the one thing we know gets lost in translation.
