Artistic creation plays role amid political chaos
“Never Look Away,” an absorbing and ruminative new drama from the German writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, begins in Dresden in 1937. The world is about to tilt into madness, a condition that seems to manifest itself early on in the brave, troubled mind of a young woman named Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl). Her nephew, an aspiring painter named Kurt (Cai Cohrs), walks in to find her playing the piano in the nude; when he flinches, she tells him, “Never look away. Everything that’s true is beautiful.”
The movie certainly makes its own case for beauty, evident in the crisp, gleaming frames of Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography and the lush strains of Max Richter’s orchestral score. As for truth, it would be hard to deny the emotional acu- ity of the performances or the moral clarity with which Von Donnersmarck confronts some of the horrors that Germany perpetrated and endured during the 20th century.
But those horrors — the epic conflagration of World War II, the brutal rise of the German Democratic Republic — also reveal the lie in Elisabeth’s sentiment. The truth is often grievously ugly, and “Never Look Away,” though it’s as pretty and polished a piece of filmmaking as you are likely to see this year, does not shy away from acknowledging as much.
This is a long picture, running more than three hours and spanning a few decades, but Von Donnersmarck, a master of pacing, hooks you almost immediately. Much of the trauma is front-loaded: The warning signs of mental illness land Elisabeth in a Dresden hospital where Carl