{"id":6975,"date":"2019-02-18T18:03:13","date_gmt":"2019-02-18T23:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=6975"},"modified":"2019-02-18T18:03:15","modified_gmt":"2019-02-18T23:03:15","slug":"review-never-look-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/?p=6975","title":{"rendered":"Review: NEVER LOOK AWAY"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

How does a man survive not one, but two state-sanctioned hells in his lifetime?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

German artist Gerhard Richter could tell you, if he wanted to – and maybe he did: in two respected works, Jurgen Schreiber \u00a0biography \u201cEin Mahler aus Deutschland,” from 2005, \u00a0and now, Florian Henckel-von Donnersmarck\u2019s \u00a0Oscar-nominated film \u201cNever Look Away,” Richter\u2019s traumatic \u00a0life is exposed in haunting detail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Regarded as Germany\u2019s most important contemporary visual artist, Gerhardt Richter initially welcomed the attention from both the biographer and the filmmaker \u2013 only to distance himself from their finished works, according to a fascinating article by Dana Goodyear in a recent issue of The New Yorker. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cai Cohrs as the young Kurt Barnert<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Henckel-von Donnersmark spent three years on his screenplay for \u201cNever Look Away,” mixing horrendous facts from Mr. Schreiber\u2019s book with his own recollections of meeting and interviewing Richter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was important to the filmmaker to get it right this time. In 2007, at the age of 33, his first movie, \u201cThe Lives of Others,” won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.\u00a0 A political thriller about Stasi, East-Germany\u2019s infamous secret police agency, \u00a0\u201cThe Lives of Others\u201d is considered the most successful German-language film in history. It was made for $2 million, took in $77 million, and was greeted with world-wide accolades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The young director\u2019s career was set to soar,  but Hollywood money and Hollywood stars beckoned him into making  \u201cThe Tourist\u201d(2010),  a pointless $100 million tourist-caper (Venice!) starring the biggest names of its day, Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With \u201cNever Look Away,” Henckel-von Donnersmark is back on\u00a0 safe ground.\u00a0 He knows his subject, his knows the eras his protagonist traverses.\u00a0 He has a story to tell, and in order to tell it without constraints, the movie is Gerhard Richter\u2019s only according to a few important facts:\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, the hero is a German artist (played by Tom Schilling) who achieves fame and riches after suffering severe trauma before, during, and after the Second World War.  Yes, he\u2019s still the child who loses classmates during the fire bombing of Dresden, the two uncles who are killed on the Eastern Front, the beloved aunt who is euthanized, the father who hangs himself, the mother, who \u2013 no, mercifully, we are spared her rape by the Russians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tom Schilling as a German artist.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We do watch him marry into a Nazi family and  we discover that his father-in-law (Sebastian Koch) is directly responsible for the young aunt\u2019s murder.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hero has a different name, however.\u00a0 Here he is Kurt Barnert, \u00a0a child prodigy at the start (1937) of the film. He is taken by his teenage Aunt Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl) to an exhibit of \u201cdegenerate art\u201d in Dresden. Kandinsky and Mondrian are shown under headings of \u201cThe Principle of Insanity\u201d and \u201cHow Sick Minds See Nature.\u201d While a docent hectors his audience \u00a0about correct and incorrect art, Elisabeth bends down to her nephew and whispers, \u201cBut I like it. Everything that\u2019s true is beautiful.\u00a0 Nie Weg sehen<\/em>. Never look away.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It will take a while for Kurt to understand what Elisabeth means. He does remembers not to look away, but he doesn\u2019t always understand what it is he sees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After the war, stuck in a Germany occupied by the Soviet Union, he attends art school.  \u201cNew\u201d art is still bad, he\u2019s told. Picasso is held up as a warning \u2013 \u201che started out well but slipped into decadence.\u201d  The individual must still serve a collective. The fatherland and Hitler in one era, Comrades and Stalin in the next one. In both Nazi-Germany and DDR, Kurt has to deny his individualism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He manages for a while. With Panglossian verve, he paints colorful murals teeming with DDR heroes, cheerful farmers and laborers. Kurt is a favored student, he is happily married, the future looks bright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sebastian Koch plays a man with a terrible past.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And yet\u2026  not knowing his father-in-law\u2019s grotesque past, he senses something is wrong in the house he and his wife, a fellow art student (Paula Beer),  must share with her parents. Before the Berlin Wall is built, the young couple escapes to the West and ends up in Dusseldorf, where Kurt attends an art school that is equally frustrating to the one he  just left.  In the West, he has the freedom to ask \u201cWho am I?\u201d –  and he is stumped.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How Kurt finds himself and his artistic vision is Henckel-von Donnersmark\u2019s interpretation of Gerhard Richter\u2019s salvation through \u201cthe healing power of art.” The most dramatic scenes in \u201cNever Look Away\u201d may never have happened in real life, but they seemed entirely plausible.\u00a0 Truth is blended with imagination, seamlessly.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without  Caleb Deschanel\u2019s breathtaking photography, many of the devastating scenes in the film would have been unbearable to watch.    \u201cNever Look Away\u201d has earned the world-renowned  American cinematographer his sixth Oscar nomination.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cast is flawless.  Of special note: Oliver Masucci in the small,  unforgettable part of<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kurt\u2019s art professor in Dusseldorf. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNever Look Away\u201d is three hours and eight minutes long. In German, with subtitles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mercy reviews the Oscar nominated foreign language film, all three plus hours of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[1287,1286,1285,1288,1289],"class_list":["post-6975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-florian-henckel-von-donnersmarck","tag-gerhardt-richter","tag-never-look-away","tag-the-lives-of-others","tag-tom-schilling","no-thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6975"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6982,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6975\/revisions\/6982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyfilmfix.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}