Germany’s ticking time-bomb
In The Fade (18) Verdict: Compelling German drama ★★★★✩
DIANE KRUGER’S lead performance in this powerful German-language drama won her the Best Actress award at Cannes last year, and it’s easy to see why: she is mesmerisingly good as Katja, a woman whose Turkish immigrant husband, Nuri, and their sixyear-old son, are killed when his Hamburg office is bombed.
Fatih Akin’s film lingers, somewhat harrowingly, on the immediate aftermath of the explosion. A distraught Katja wants to see her loved ones, but is told ‘they’re no longer people, just body parts’.
The police assume that Nuri’s past conviction for drugdealing has something to do with his death. They suspect Turkish or Kurdish mobsters. But Katja is convinced white supremacists planted the bomb, and in a startling scene she finds out in the nick of time that she is right.
A husband and wife, known neo-Nazis, are arrested and charged with murder.
In The Fade (a title which I suspect makes more sense in the original German) unfolds over three acts. The first concerns the crime, then a middle act focuses on the trial, with the last third or so following Katja’s plans to dispense her own brand of justice.
This final act is the least convincing; there are a string of developments which strain credibility, though never quite to snapping point.
As a whole, this is a really terrific film, and timely, too, with the violent Far Right on the march across Europe.