European Films

An Istanbul-born Greek returns to his city of birth several decades after a forced exile in the big fat Greek crowd pleaser Politiki Kouzina (A Touch of Spice). The Tassos Boulmetis film set records upon its release in Greece and its lush displays of delicious-looking Mediterranean food has assured some travel abroad, even though Kouzina’s story is not really the equivalent of a properly structured three-course meal but rather a languidly paced evening made up of trying different smaller courses, the mezedes.

Gastronomy and astronomy mix in the story of Fanis, who as a curious 7-year-old Greek boy in Istanbul listens to his grandfather dispensing maxims, aphorisms and life wisdoms along with the spices customers come to buy in his shop. Upstairs, where garlic and pepper garlands hang from the rafters, he initiates Fanis into the secrets of spicing up one’s cooking and one’s life. These moments of amber-lighted family bliss are ruthlessly disturbed by the greater political unease in Greek-Turkish relations when, in their battle over Cyprus, Turkey has all Greek citizens deported from its soil. Grandfather, who has a Turkish passport, remains behind as Fanis and his parents arrive in Greece, a country that is their fatherland but in which they have never lived. There he will grow up to be an assistant-cook in a restaurant before becoming a renowned astronomer.

Inspired by the director’s own life, the story shows Fanis’s trouble in adapting to Greece, which involves joining the boy scouts (allegedly good for “patriotism”) who end up singing Christmas carols at a local brothel and getting Fanis invited in – to cook. The small genius chef is a real worry for the parents (and a quirky laugh-generator for the audience) as he takes up cooking as a way of staying connected to his city and to the memories of his grandfather and the Turkish girl Saime he left behind.

Boulmetis has a gift for finding the magical in the mundane, and several of his scenes (including a visit of the grown-up Fanis to the attic of his grandfather’s shop) are small wonders of cinematic craft, even if they do not always succeed in seamlessly integrating the computer-generated effects of flying spices, umbrellas and towering cityscapes with the wonderful photography of Takis Zervoulakos. The larger political problems that the deportation of the family obviously ties into are mostly kept to the background, except for a somewhat sappily executed but effective scene in which Fanis’s father is whispered something to by the emigration official who has come to announce their forced departure.

As Fanis arrives back in Istanbul for the first time in over three decades, the astronomer and the audience have been through a lot together and Georges Corraface (who plays Fanis as an adult) is an actor with enough gravitas to suggest he actually lived through all these events and more. But Politiki Kouzina feels like less than the sum of its parts, despite even an artificially imposed menu-like superstructure of “mezedes”, “main course” and “dessert”, which does nothing but underline the overall lack of structure.

Boulmetis’ script seems to suggest that the scenes of wonder, heartbreak and merriment that we were presented with were in fact just randomly picked scenes in the lives of the characters, as if flipping through a photo album in which the choice of pictures was dictated by the need to have had a camera at hand rather than the need to document important moments.

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