Never Look Away
“Never Look Away,” Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s first German film since the Oscar-winning “The Lives of Others” (2006), is an absorbing, sweeping narrative of the development of a great artist from his boyhood in Nazi Germany to his constricted development as an artist in Communist East Germany to his escape to the West shortly before the construction of the Berlin Wall was completed.
Pleasing, it is. Good, solid stuff. But one wonders how much better the film would have been had von Donnersmarck honestly explored the life of his inspiration, artist Gerhard Richter, rather than the fictional Kurt Barnert.
As “Bohemian Rhapsody” did with Freddie Mercury, “Never Look Away” distorts history, simplifying a complex artistic life to satisfy a classic, predictable Hollywood-style narrative structure. Richter, now 87, hates the film and says it goes too far, blurring the lines between fiction and reality in the way he once blurred photographic realism. (A dissenting view: “The Exorcist” and “French Connection” director William Friedkin tweeted in December, “One of the finest films I’ve ever seen is NEVER LOOK AWAY — a masterpiece.”)
It is an undeniably appealing movie, a sumptuous production with pitch-perfect acting, providing an old-fashioned escapism that makes for a good night out at the movies. Despite its three-hour, eight-minute length, it never drags. And like “Bo Rhap,” it is nominated in a best picture Oscar category (for foreign language film — it is also nominated for Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography).
Beginning in 1937, Dresden (Richter’s hometown), young Kurt’s most defining relationship is that with his young, free-spirited Aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl). She’s more fun than Mom, taking the boy out to art museums and encouraging his drawing talent. But she’s fragile, and with the Nazis in power and World War II in the offing, world events get the better of Elisabeth, who has a mental breakdown, is carted off to a mental hospital and then, unbeknownst to the family, euthanized under a program to purify the Aryan race carried out by a Professor Seeband (Sebastian Koch).
(Fact check: It was Richter’s sister who was a diagnosed schizophrenic and was euthanized.)
Skip ahead to the end of the war, and Dresden is under Soviet control as part of East Germany and Kurt is now played by Tom Schilling. Kurt is accepted into the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and is a star student, mastering the communist-dictated social realism.
At the school, he meets a pretty fashion student who has the same name and same vibe as his aunt; as ‘Elisabeth’ is too painful for him to say, he calls her Ellie (Paula Beer), and their courtship begins immediately. But there’s an obstacle: her father, the same Professor Seeband responsible for the death of his aunt. Kurt, not knowing how his aunt actually died, doesn’t make the connection.
That sets up the plot’s main conflict — Kurt’s development amid the forces of repression — the state and his father-inlaw.
Von Donnersmarck’s last film was in Hollywood — the Johnny Depp-Angelina Jolie romantic thriller “The Tourist” way back in 2010. Is he auditioning here for another shot at Hollywood?
Unlike its main character’s paintings, it is not a great work of art. But it is a most agreeable, pleasurable cinematic calling card.