“Ghosts” in the cinema | Very close to kitsch

A youth film by the old romantic Akin Photo: Bombero International/Rialto Film/Warner Bros. I was pleasantly surprised: the young love is heading towards a bad car accident - and the film doesn't show it. But only the before and the after. Finally, I thought, German cinema doesn't tell everything and foregoes the spectacular crash in slow motion. After all, the viewer has enough imagination; you don't have to tell her every detail.

But the big end comes late. In “Ghosts,” Fatih Akin recounts the accident several times from different perspectives – including desperate attempts to free himself under water and the usual blubb-blubb. Only when you know every detail that takes place in the Elbe can you put what is happening above the water surface in the right light. The reference here is less Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" than Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo".

There is a narrative reason why the accident is initially left out: the prospective student Faris, who just wanted to drive his new crush Farasha home after the graduation party and lost him in the process, cannot remember what happened because he was unconscious. The question of guilt is not the issue here; the script makes that bluntly clear with the information it puts in the mouth of a police officer: A construction site was inadequately signposted at night.

Rather, “Ghosts” wants to pull the audience into the whirlpool of these strong emotions – youthful infatuation, depression and grief after loss – and pulls out all the tried and tested stops to do so. The film particularly triggered a fear of heights for me - the worst scene in the overused backdrop of the reconstructed Hamburg television tower haunted me in bed that night.

According to Islamic mythology, the deceased can appear to her loved ones in dreams for 40 days, and Farasha causes a lot of chaos because she doesn't want to let Faris go. For those left behind, it is a pure nightmare to wake up from the romances created by the woman they love. The dream couple strolls through relevant places in the deserted Hanseatic city, which the tourism office should be very happy about.

Akin pleasantly doesn't rely on stars here, but rather on new faces.

“Ghosts” is also an attempt by the 53-year-old Hamburg director to be close to a younger generation. Anime and manga were the style guidelines for Frank Griebe's camera - popular culture that Akin introduced to his children and which often has a certain theatricality and strikingness.

And the marketing machine is rolling: During production, the director fell in love with the working version in black and white and has now produced two versions of the film: “In color, the film is a movie, a love story. In black and white, it’s a work of art about existentialism,” he says. (The press only got to see the love story in advance.) A graphic novel in manga style will also be released to coincide with the film's release.

Akin pleasantly doesn't rely on stars here, but rather on new faces: Mariam Dawoud (without any acting experience) and Eren M. Güvercin know how to cast a spell as Farasha and Faris. After the Nazis in "Amrum," people from immigrant families are once again the focus, as in Akin's debut "Kurz und würenlos" (1998), which is also set in Akin's hometown, and Akin talks about them more empathetically than any other prominent German director. Faris has an (absent) Turkish father; Farasha has a butterfly tattooed over the scars from her escape from Syria.

“Ghosts” is more of a youth film by the old romantic Akin, built to the point of kitsch. When the butterfly tattoo flies off, the limit has been crossed. But with real dialogue, real people and all-too-human ghosts - and not least thanks to Malakoff Kowalski's electrifying soundtrack, which moves close to the characters' lives - Akin always gets the hang of things. He can't help it, but he can.

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