In the Fade offers thoughtful take on brutal tale
Diane Kruger took Best Actress at Cannes for her lead role in this new drama by German auteur Fatih Akin (“Head-On”), which gives agency to a mother’s rage and the most powerful of human emotions.
Kruger seizes and holds every frame as Katja, who is caught with documentary urgency by cinematographer Rainer Klausmann’s camera.
Katja is a Hamburg woman out to avenge the terrorist bombing that killed her husband and young son, and the subsequent travesty of justice that added to her misery.
She and her Kurdish-German husband Nuri (Numan Acar), had reason to believe they’d settled into happy domesticity with their six-year-old son Rocco (Rafael Santana).
Nuri had been a drug dealer — the movie opens with his prison wedding to Katja — but he’d gone straight, working as a legal adviser to Turks and Kurds at a community centre. Katja worked as his bookkeeper.
The bombing, which Katja narrowly escapes, takes it all away in a brutal flash.
The cops are quick to blame Nuri’s past. Perhaps this was an act of revenge by drug dealers or the Turkish mob? Or maybe Nuri was being “politically active” again?
Other suspects emerge: husband and wife neo-Nazis André (Ulrich Brandhoff ) and Edda (Hanna Hilsdorf ). (There is a real-life basis for this: Akin, a German with Turkish roots, was moved to make “In the Fade” by a string of neo-Nazi attacks against immigrants to Germany in the early 2000s.)
A subsequent court trial, ferociously argued by opposing attorneys played by Denis Moschitto and Johannes Krisch, makes a mockery of justice and the concept of “reasonable doubt.”
Katja has now lost not only her family, but also her reason for existence. Akin shows how deep her depression is; he also revealed in the courtroom scene the extent of damage wrought by the nail bomb in the attack.
Katja will decide to take the law into her own hands — she’ll soon sport a samurai tattoo — but the film doesn’t follow the usual path of the payback thriller, where violence is met with even more violence. All credit to Kruger for breathing life into a character typically designed for the taking of it.
“In the Fade,” Germany’s Oscar entry and a recent Golden Globes winner, offers an unusually thoughtful take on a brutal genre.
It asks questions about grief and justice that resonate with these perilous times, all the more so in light of recent terror atrocities the world over.