The third feature film by the spectacularly named,
blue-blood German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Never
Look Away, is a touching, historically charged, well-acted, beautifully
photographed, emotionally engaging, and ultimately inspiring picture – a
brilliant, quiet epic about life and art and – well, quite a lot of things,
really. Von Donnersmarck’s first
feature, the great 2006 film The Lives of
Others, justly won awards for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars, the Golden Globes (Hollywood Foreign
Press Association), and BAFTA (British
Academy of Film and Television Arts). Never
Look Away too is nominated for the 2019 Oscar in that category. I would not be disappointed if it wins
(although the foreign language nominees this year all are strong, and in truth each
deserves to win.)
The story traces the development of a young German from the
age of six in 1937 through his breakthrough as a major artist in the mid 1960s,
inspired in some important ways by the early life of Gerhardt Richter – widely
regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists (according to
Wikipedia and others). Along the way, Never Look Away explores many
interrelated themes, among them: how the past shapes the present; more specifically,
how the despotism of Hitler’s regime was mirrored by the soviet-controlled GDR administration
which succeeded it in East Germany where, as Jessica Kiang has put it, the war-weary
population did not experience communism so much as a liberation but as a
continuation; how growing up in such repressive circumstances is reflected in
the coming of age of the protagonist and his lover/future wife; how gaining freedom
from totalitarian constraints is far from a panacea, bringing with it personal
challenges that may be more interesting but are also, in many respects, more
difficult; how there is no guarantee of moral justice in this world; and how art
and artists can illuminate and help us understand some basic truths. Everything
that’s true is beautiful.
One element of the story, early on, is concerned with the corrupting
power of Nazism’s institutional cruelty
and inhumanity. This is done quite effectively, humanized in a way that stirs
our emotions. But if that were the only focus or even just the primary point of Never Look Away, it would be a
somewhat redundant picture. It’s been done so many times before, often with
equal and occasionally greater purpose and effect. But here, it’s just the
starting point.
The period spanned by Never Look Away encompasses three of
the most consequential and fascinating decades in the German social and
political experience and, not incidentally, of its art history. During the
Weimar period (1920s through early 1930s), the center of the struggle was the
Bauhaus, a modernist, progressive school of design and art with which pretty
much all the leading artists of the day were aligned. When the Nazi party came
to power, one of its first acts was to force the closure of the Bauhaus in
early 1933. They saw the school as internationalist and Bolshevist, and modern
art more generally as a sign of mental derangement (not an unpopular view at
the time). In 1937, the Nazis mounted the
humongous “Degenerate Art Exhibition”,
a road show intended to propagandize their view that modern art was not only
sick and degenerate, but also part of a vast Jewish conspiracy – “an insult to
German feeling.” The exhibition featured
some 650 paintings and other artworks by the likes of Paul Klee, Wassily
Kandinsky, Max Beckman, Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, among many others - art
that had been confiscated from museums and private owners. The exhibit was a
smash hit, seen by over two million visitors – an average of more than 20,000
per day!
Among these visitors are six-year old Kurt Barnert and his pretty,
doting, twenty-one-year-old aunt, Elizabeth May (Saskia Rosendahl). Young Kurt,
who will become our protagonist, wants to be an artist one day; he is
fascinated by the paintings he sees, but dismayed at their guide’s exceedingly
negative spiel about their aesthetic and moral worthlessness. Elizabeth
whispers to him reassuringly that she actually really likes this stuff. A bit
later, back home, she gives him a bit of enigmatic but seminal advice, which will
stay with him into adulthood. “Never
look away, Kurt," she says. “Everything
that is true is beautiful.” As described
by Donnersmarck and portrayed by Rosendahl, Elizabeth represents freedom, art,
beauty, extreme sensitivity and madness, all in one. It’s the madness that will
be her undoing; yet compared to the derangement enveloping her homeland, it was
nothing.
One horrid aspect of this national insanity was the Hitler’s
eugenics and euthanasia campaign, aimed at purifying the race by singling out and
removing certain undesirables (deemed “life unworthy of life”), among them the congenitally
or chronically ill and the mentally ill. (The notion of fiddling with genetics
to perfect the human genome continues to appeal to some folks even today,
usually scrubbed of its more barbaric associations, but no less morally
troubling.)
It’s at about this time that we meet Professor Carl Seeband
(Sebastian Koch), an amoral, dyed-in-the wool Nazi physician. The professor is arrogant,
vain, starchily handsome, intelligent and highly ambitious. We will soon learn,
as their stories intertwine over the next several decades, that he is a polar
opposite to the person Kurt will become, and a formidable antagonist to Kurt’s
protagonist. But that’s in the future. Of note about the professor throughout the
story is that that he is not the usual cardboard villain; he’s a real person
with some dimensions – definitely a monster, but what is truly monstrous about
him, as actor Sebastian Koch notes, is that
“he’s convinced he is doing the right thing. There is no feeling of wrongdoing,
no sense of guilt. He does what he does because for him there is no
alternative.” Koch’s brilliant
performance makes this evident. (The
actor, by the way, also starred in The
Lives of Others as Dreymann – the successful writer and urbane sophisticate
that Stassi agent Gerd Wiesler, his polar
opposite, is spying on and eventually comes to admire.)
Jump forward a few years and Kurt, now played by Tom
Schilling (Generation War), is a
student at the Art Academy in East Berlin. It might as just as well have been
called the Craft Academy. In the GDR, artists were “encouraged” to work in a
highly representational style known as Socialist Realism, which strongly
resembled Nazi art in its emphasis on heroic images glorifying state-sanctioned
values. Government sponsored murals were big. Self-expression, independence and
experimentation, as practiced by artists in the West, were seen as bourgeois
and selfish. Art is not about “Ich Ich Ich” (me, me, me) Kurt is told; it’s
about service to society. The skill to produce such art came naturally for Kurt;
the soul, however, wasn’t so willing.
It is at the Berlin academy that Kurt, meets another
Elizabeth (Paula Beer), a lovely girl studying fashion design. Uncomfortable in
the name association with his long-gone aunt, Kurt calls her Ellie.
Predictably, yet charmingly, they soon fall passionately in love. As in any
good love story (which this is), there are problems and impediments. One is
Ellie’s powerful father, domineering to the point of being tyrannical. Kurt has
never met him before, but … well, let’s avoid blatant spoilers. Suffice to say
that he is a malignant presence in their lives. Then there is the depressing prospect,
particularly for Kurt, of a lifetime of soulless work for the state in the
communist East. And so, in 1961, Ellie
and Kurt decide to defect to the West - surprisingly easy in the period before
the infamous Berlin wall, provided you don’t carry a suitcase.
In West Germany, it was expected that young artists would
seek to break with tradition, try new things, and come up with a “new” idea. Kurt
and Ellie settle in Dusseldorf, a renowned center of experimental art. There’s
paint splashing, canvas slashing, performance art, wallpaper art, sculpting
with new materials, anything and everything.
Expressing one’s personal vision was the highest value. But how do you find that?
The last act of the movie tracks Kurt’s attempt to find his way
as an artist. Looking around at what his fellow students are doing, the myriad
stylistic choices are overwhelming. It seems everything has already been tried.
And, he’s told, painting is passé anyway. The head of the academy is the
mythic, inscrutable Professor van Verten - a very cool Oliver Masucci [Look Who’s Back (2015)] - who famously
tells students never to ask his opinion about their work, adding “only you will
know if it’s any good.” That doesn’t stop Verten from paying a visit to Kurt’s
studio, looking over his experiments, and pronouncing, “This isn’t you.”
You’d think this would not be helpful, but in a way it is.
In fact, one of the highlights of Never Look Away is how it is able to
depict the almost ineffable process that Kurt goes through as he searches to
find something that’s honest – not trendy or commercial or what he imagines
other people want to see or expect him to do, but rather something meaningful that comes out
of his own unique experience (which we have had the privilege to share); and then
to somehow artfully render this vision on canvas. For a motion picture to allow
us to experience this process even vicariously, in the midst of an already
compelling narrative, is fascinating and, for me at least, quite thrilling.
In an odd yet reassuring way, Never Look Away returns
at the end to its beginning. This may
seem a bit schmaltzy to some, but in this case (with apologies to E. F. Schumacher)
schmaltz is beautiful. You might even shed a tear of melancholy-tinged joy.
Contributing to the power of Never Look Away is an
evocative, modern score composed by Max Richter [The Lunchbox (2013), Testament
of Youth (2014), Mary Queen of Scots
(2018)]; as well as some gorgeous photography, sometimes intimate, sometimes
sweeping, by the great
cinematographer, Caleb Deschanel [The Black Stallion (1979), The
Right Stuff (1983), The Passion of
the Christ (2004), Jack Reacher
(2012)]. Deschanel, who was nominated for the cinematography Oscar five times
in the past, is again nominated for Never Look Away.
As I’ve mentioned, the cast is just terrific in every
respect – especially Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer, Oliver Masucci and Tom
Schilling. My only complaint about the movie (and this is a quibble) is that
Paula Beer didn’t get more screen
time as Kurt’s wife, Ellie. For much of their onscreen relationship, Ellie’s
experience gets nearly as much attention as Kurt’s, and their stories blend so seamlessly, that she is almost a co-protagonist – but then, in the final
act, the focus shifts predominantly to Kurt, with Ellie relegated to the
background. This is a shame; and yet, had it been otherwise, the film would
have been even longer, and its focus on the artistic experience may have been
diluted.
As it is, the movie runs just over three hours; but it does
not feel long. It’s hard to see how it could have been edited to cut down the
time. Every scene resonates; each seems integral to the whole. The story builds
and builds, as we pass through different eras, as different issues and themes arise;
and the narrative slowly builds to an encompassing ending.
Never Look Away is, in my book, one of the great and most
memorable movies of 2018. It’s a movie-lover’s feast. Released in parts of
Europe in October and in New York and L.A. briefly in December, it is just now
being rolled out to select theaters across the USA. Definitely look for this one and check it
out. As I said at the beginning, it’s an epic, and I do recommend that you see
this on the big screen if possible. It will be time well spent.
Trailer available Here.
188 minutes Rated R for nudity and disturbing Nazism
Grade: A Subtitled
Now playing in NYC and L.A. Opening Friday February 15, 2019 in San Francisco, Berkeley, San Rafael, Encino, San Diego, Denver, Washington DC, Brooklyn, Atlanta, Chicago, Cambridge, and other cities; continuing in a slow rollout over the following several weeks. Check your local listings or click here for the theater and opening date near you.
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