Never LOOK Away

director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

cast Tom Schilling, Paula Beer, Sebastian Koch

A THREE-DECADE, three-hour epic, Never Look Away is an overview of the German artistic landscape pulled from the life of photorealistic painter Gerhard Richter. Fictionalised here as Kurt Barnert (Schilling, charismatic), it charts a young artist’s journey through East and West German art movements, poking fun at the avant-garde’s pretension. It looks beautiful, is well played and intermittently engages. But it leans to melodrama in stretches involving Kurt’s lover Ellie (Beer) and her Evil Doctor father (Koch), has little to say about the confusion in post-war German art, and ultimately lacks the vice-like grip of von Donnersmarck’s breakthrough, The Lives Of Others.