Bridging Europe’s cultural divide

Europe is a cultural ground zero of Muslim frustration bristling against and challenging the continent’s vaunted ideals of tolerance. The bombings in Madrid and London, the slaying of a Dutch director by an Islamic extremist and the furor over a set of Danish cartoons have led to anger and chagrin in the mosques and salons.

It is a rich, if tricky, terrain for film. With dramas, comedies and documentaries, directors are seeking to go beyond head scarves and aperitifs to prick a European conscience increasingly insecure about multiculturalism. And it is no small irony that these filmmakers are exploring the effect of Islam at a time when Christian Europe is happily adrift in secularism.

A number of movies at the recent Berlin International Film Festival brought penetrating charm and disquieting realism to the cultural divide.

“Schnitzel Paradise” whirls with comedic quips wrapped around a love story that touches on ethnic tensions simmering in a restaurant kitchen in the Netherlands. “One to One” probes cultural suspicion in Denmark when a Dane is beaten into a coma and an immigrant Palestinian seems the likely culprit. The documentary “Hamburg Lectures” examines the jihad teachings of an imam in the German mosque frequented by Sept. 11 hijackers.

Watching the films in this order -- “Schnitzel Paradise,” “One to One” and “Hamburg Lectures” -- one could discern the jagged arc that sometimes leads from aspiring Muslim immigrant to holy warrior. Through these and other European movies, it becomes apparent that the young men who arrived here decades ago as guest workers are now grandfathers in large families with narratives that are often at odds with the continent around them.

The director of “Schnitzel Paradise,” Martin Koolhoven, was working on the script in 2004 when fellow Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was stabbed and shot to death by an Islamic militant in Amsterdam. Van Gogh had angered Muslim radicals with “Submission,” a film depicting the rape and forced marriage of a Muslim woman. In many ways, “Submission” was the precursor to today’s outrage over the Danish cartoons depicting Muhammad and questions about freedom of expression and religious tolerance.

“The Dutch film community is small, and we all knew Van Gogh,” said Koolhoven. “It was a big shock. We thought, ‘What are we supposed to do now with our movie? Do we change it? Are we on dangerous ground?’

“Of course, there’s a moment when you get scared. Can we joke about integration and ethnic issues? But then I honestly felt we were insulting nobody. We were doing the right thing. And if you don’t go ahead, you might as well stop making movies.”

One of the most popular Dutch films of 2005, “Schnitzel Paradise” is a rollicking tale of forbidden love arising out of a hotel kitchen. A bright young Moroccan student, Nordip, is not keen on his shopkeeper father’s dream of his becoming a doctor. In a stab at rebellion, Nordip secretly takes a job as a dishwasher in the Blue Vulture Hotel, where the scruffy, often inebriated kitchen manager informs him that “cooking is war.”

The kitchen staff is a mix of Moroccans, Turks, Dutch and a spooky Serb with a meat cleaver. The main ingredient, however, is Agnes, a beautiful Dutch waitress whose family owns the hotel. Agnes glides angel-like through schnitzel smoke and heaps of testosterone. She and Nordip flirt and eventually cross the cultural boundaries that agitate Sander, a blond cook with a nasty streak who prefers Moroccans on one side of his plate and Dutch on the other.

The outcome is predictable, but the film is not preachy, preferring instead to allow comedy and shrewd asides to navigate the vagaries of ethnic complexity. The icons of demarcation between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl are plainly drawn in Nordip’s cramped flat, which is filled with the aspirations of his praying father, and Agnes’ stately home glowing behind the click of an electronic gate. The couple escape these strictures to ride, a soundtrack rising behind them, through fields of sunflowers. This is the Netherlands, after all.

“One to One” pretends no glint of humor. It opens with the unfurled blueprints of a Copenhagen housing project that developers envision as a utopia “where the sun will shine and traffic will not drown out the birdsong.” This noble plan is marred when a young Dane, Per, is found beaten and bloody. He slips into a coma; cultural animosities hover over his hospital bed and infect the green expanses and alleys of the project.

Per’s sister, Mie, dates Shadi, the son of Palestinian immigrants. Shadi believes his brother, Tareq, may have been involved in the assault. Per’s white friends are convinced a minority is the attacker. Director Annette K. Olesen uncoils suspicion in restrained, lingering scenes that speak to the difficulties of ethnic harmony in a Europe wary of terrorism and confounded over a Muslim population that has doubled since the late 1980s.

Each character wrestles with his or her fears. Mie wonders whether she can trust Shadi. Shadi doubts Tareq but shares with him being a minority who speaks Arabic at home and Danish everywhere else while precariously balancing between cultures. Per’s mother, Sos, is a social worker whose belief in diversity has kept her family in the project even as most Danes have fled. Her isolation is apparent when Sos’ pale skin and blond hair are highlighted by black head scarves and foreign faces on the street around her.

The threat of retribution crackles amid the glow of cellphones. Shadi is pummeled by a white gang. Tareq is innocent, but it seems too late. Prejudice has overshadowed truth and the war is on, even as Per opens his bruised eyes.

“Everything that happens only happens with God’s permission.” Such are the words of Mohammed Fizazi, the radical imam at the Al Quds mosque in Hamburg that was frequented by Sept. 11 hijackers. On Jan. 3 and Jan. 5, 2000, Fizazi’s anti-Western, jihad-justifying lessons were videotaped. They are the basis for director Romuald Karmakar’s documentary, “Hamburg Lectures.”

It is a challenging look at the power of rhetoric and the convolution and nuance of warped ideas. Karmakar used a similar formula in an earlier film, “The Himmler Project,” about a 1943 speech by Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler that mentioned extermination of the Jews.

In “Hamburg Lectures,” Fizazi and his followers in the mosque’s prayer room are not on-screen. Instead, the verbatim text of the imam’s lectures is recited to the camera by actor Manfred Zapatka. With graying-reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses perched low on his nose, he looks anything but a militant teacher. The effect at first is disconcerting, especially when Zapatka reads Fizazi’s arcane interpretations regarding fasting, spotting a full moon, and questions such as: Can a woman fly alone from the Middle East to visit her husband in Germany?

These dizzying ruminations are the subtext for something more sinister. Like the tide growing higher on a beach, the lectures gradually reveal how Fizazi’s hatred of the West could influence angry, disillusioned men. There are no new Islamic extremist secrets here: The West has oppressed the Muslim world and robbed it of its natural and human resources. “The unbelievers today are warmongers,” says Fizazi, who justifies jihad in the desire to one day bring an Islamic caliphate to Europe.

What’s chilling, however, is how Zapatka’s intentionally monotone delivery lends a strange force to Fizazi’s words, perhaps because we know such sermons delivered from Germany to Afghanistan were the seeds and logic behind Sept. 11 and the subsequent attacks in Madrid and London.