‘Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush’ Review: A Real-Life Injustice Remade as Light Comic Drama
variety.comJessica Kiang Turning a deeply serious, controversial incident in recent German history into a bouncy, beat-the-odds character comedy is a brave move.
Thanks in large part to the extrovert likability of German-Turkish star Meltem Kaptan — well-known in Germany as a comedian and TV presenter — Andreas Dresen’s “Rabiye Kurnaz vs.
George W. Bush” just about gets away with it. But that’s as far as its bravery goes. Having expended all its creative energy on that one tonal dice-roll, the film proceeds by the numbers, with the messy, provocative real-life miscarriage of justice it chronicles tamed to march to the merry beat of the inspirational true-story genre.The action begins one October morning in 2001, in the bustling Bremen household of the Turkish-immigrant Kurnaz family.
Brassy matriarch Rabiye (Kaptan) — forever cheerfully cooking, cleaning and washing up for her brood — goes to call her eldest son Murat (Abdullah Emre Öztürk) down for breakfast and discovers he is not only not home, but en route to Pakistan.
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