National Post (National Edition)
Never Look Away
STORY OF LOVE AND TALE OF A SUFFERING SOCIETY
Germany’s submission to this year’s Academy Awards breezes by in a mere three hours and nine minutes. And I’m not being sarcastic; not since Toni Erdmann — another German foreign-language nominee from 2017 — has so much cinematic time passed so effortlessly.
Much of this has to do with the breadth of story being told. It opens in Dresden in 1937 and wraps up in 1966; a more eventful 29 years in Germany I cannot imagine.
The central character is Kurt Barnert (played by Tom Schilling as soon as the character is old enough), who has wanted to be an artist since he was a little boy.
That opening scene finds young Kurt taking in the famous Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich, a bizarre attempt by the Nazi party to downplay non-aryan art by showing how terrible it was.
Kurt, in the company of his freethinking Aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), comes away more impressed than disgusted.
Alas, Elisabeth’s emotional keel isn’t quite even, and Nazi Germany was not a good place to be schizophrenic. Kurt watches as she is taken away to a hospital, at which point the film briefly follows her story, which intersects with that of an SS doctor named Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch) and does not end happily.
The end of the war touches everyone. Kurt’s father, a teacher who reluctantly joined the Nazi party but only on paper — he had a trick of saying ““drei liter” (three litres) instead of “Heil Hitler” — can’t find teaching work in Soviet-controlled East Germany, and has to take a custodial job.
Carl seems about to be unmasked as part of the Nazi eugenics program, but helps deliver the baby of a highranking Russian’s wife, and earns the man’s protection. And Kurt enrols in art school and meets the love of his life, Ellie (Paula Beer).
Did I mention she looks more than a little like his beloved aunt? Or that she’s Seeband’s daughter? Well, it’ ll all come back to roost.
Never Look Away is the latest film from writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. His first feature, 2006’s The Lives of Others, was set in East Berlin near the end of the Cold War and deservedly won the foreign-language Oscar.
He inexplicably followed up with The Tourist, an English-language Euro-spyromance that starred Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp and somehow earned three Golden Globe nominations in spite of the fact that everyone hated it.
He’s back on firmer ground here, loosely basing the character of Kurt on 87-year-old painter Gerhard Richter, who has said he hates the film. Well of course he does. Kurt notes at one point that no one likes photographs of themselves, but everyone is supposed to like paintings. He takes this to mean that photos are thus more truthful. But where does that leave movies? They use artifice to get at something real, a photographic falsehood in the service of a greater truth. Unless presented as hagiography, its subject will see only the lies.
In any case, this is not The Gerhard Richter Story. Von Donnersmarck has plucked what he wants from biography and history and invented the rest, crafting a love story that is also the tale of a society suffering in the throes of political madness. Kurt learns that in Nazi Germany and in East Germany, art serves the state. It troubles him, but it keeps him occupied. When he escapes to the West, a few months before the wall went up, the artistic freedom unleashes in him first an orgasm of output, but then stagnation.
He will have to reach into the past — his own and the nation’s — to find inspiration again. Meanwhile, the film, shot by Caleb Deschanel — a six-time Oscar nominee, first for 1983’s The Right Stuff and lately for this very film — delivers images shot through with light, reminding us of Vermeer, Van Gogh and more. And Schilling and Beer excel as the young lovers.
When they meet at school, she is a fashion student. She makes him a suit.
He paints her into a picture. It’s an almost fairytale transaction. To find out whether von Donnersmarck allows them a happily ever after requires patience, but it’s worth the wait. ≤≤≤≤≤