‘Never Look Away': Art imitates life, and also ‘Road House’ | Movie review
In 'Never Look Away,' 'Lives of Others' director Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck returns to Germany to tell the epic story of a painter who survives the war and becomes a central figure in the conceptual art scene, loosely based on the life of Gerhard Richter.
You have to admire the chutzpah of a guy who makes a three-hour-and-nine-minute movie and calls it Never Look Away.
Especially a guy — writer director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck — whose last movie was The Tourist.
To be fair, before his Johnny Depp/Angelina Jolie debacle, von Donnersmarck made the Oscar-winning foreign language film The Lives of Others. Never Look Away finds him back on comfortable ground, in his native Germany (the film is in German with subtitles), working confidently on a story that sustains interest despite its eccentric flourishes and epic length.
It starts in Dresden just before the war, where a young boy named Kurt is watching the mental disintegration of a loving but eccentric aunt, who is committed involuntarily to a mental institution, just at the time the Nazis are implementing a policy to rid the fatherland of people deemed to be genetically deficient.
The last time little Kurt sees her, she’s being sedated and hauled away in an ambulance, and there is more wartime attrition to come. He survives (played as an adult by Tom Schilling), but war claims the lives of most of his relatives in one way or another (we see the infamous firebombing of Dresden), and von Donnersmarck moves the story to East Berlin after the war, where Kurt is employed (or impressed into service) as an artist/muralist by authoritarian socialists, who insist that he work in a style dictated by the Stalinist government.
The work is stifling, but the women in the art school are beautiful, and he falls for Ellie (Paula Beer), daughter of a prominent physician, whose history with the Nazi party is part of the movie’s lively and rather melodramatic plotting. Von Donnersmarck, for instance, shows us Nazi horrors and the atrocities of war (intentional and collateral), then shifts abruptly to a love story that has some of the frivolousness of romantic comedy (a naked Tom climbing down a tree, encountering his girlfriend’s amused mother).
This is in questionable taste, but in the director’s defense, he’s following the broad outline of the life of artist Gerhard Richter (who apparently is not thrilled with the homage). To that end, the story follows Kurt to the freedom of West Germany — the movie has uncanny echoes of Cold War, trading music for painting and pessimism for optimism — where he begins to study art seriously.
Kurt has a hard time finding his own voice as an artist amid the development of Germany’s conceptual movement, and though Never delves into the meaning of art and the purpose of the artist, moments of windy pretension are balanced with humor — Kurt adopts and discards famous styles, and looks sheepish when caught imitating Jackson Pollock.
His lost voice has something to do with his lost family, and those two elements converge in the film’s madly ambitious final third — part art history, part ghost story, enlivened with life-affirming miracles and cosmic justice, and also the Patrick Swayze/Kelly Lynch loft scene from Road House.
You can call this sex scene over-the-top, but you can’t call it gratuitous.
MOVIES
Never Look Away
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. With Tom Schilling, Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer and Saskia Rosendahl. Distributed by Sony Classics.
Run time: 3 hours, 9 mins.
Parents guide: R (graphic nudity, sexuality and brief violent images)
Playing at: Ritz East, AMC Voorhees