Mark Reviews Movies: NEVER LOOK AWAY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 29, 2018

Writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's screenplay for Never Look Away takes its time. It is, ultimately, a story about how the past—remembered either fully or partially but never forgotten—lives on, despite the years, the attempts to forget it, or the ways in which people or the world change. As such, this story begins in the main character's past—a past in which he is far from a central figure—in an extended prologue. Those scenes are about the horrors that will soon haunt the world, those who lived through it, and, eventually, the artist who becomes the heart of the story, even though he does not fully understand his own connection to that past, amidst the issues of the present.

Donnersmarck's narrative here, inspired by the life story of artist Gerhard Richter, is at once expansive in scope and unfortunately limited in its aims. The broad scope of it mostly comes from that prologue, which spends a considerable amount of time detailing the terrible fate of the main character's aunt. Two important connections, which are both considerable and fleeting, are established or made over the course of the opening sequence: the aunt's relationship with her young nephew, who would grow up to become the artist, and the man who condemns the aunt to death.

Those connections persist throughout the rest of the story, although the two major characters who knew the aunt don't know that the other character knew her. We do, and we keep waiting, for the entire course of the movie's three-hour length, for what seems like an inevitable moment of realization, conflict, and/or consequences.

The moment does arrive in some way. It's considerably less momentous than one might expect, considering how conveniently Donnersmarck's maintains the connection between those two characters and how often he plays with the dramatic irony of the situation—the fact that we know but the characters don't. This downplaying of the inevitable is admirable, if only because it feels authentic, but it also serves as a stark contrast to the rest of the movie, which amplifies the tension and the coincidences to such a degree that it feels like melodrama, compared to where Donnersmarck's finally arrives with the story.

The prologue might be the strongest section here. We're introduced to Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), who takes her young nephew to an exhibit of banned art in Dresden. It's the 1930s, and the Nazis are at the height of their power. Elisabeth, who encourages her nephew's artistic aspirations, also suffers from schizophrenia.

She's taken away by SS-aligned doctors, and some time later, Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), the head of the facility and a believer in the Nazi eugenics program, sends Elisabeth to a camp, where she's killed in a gas chamber. When the war ends, Carl wins favor with a Russian officer, avoiding a certain death sentence.

The story returns after the war and follows the nephew, now a young man, named Kurt Barnet (Tom Schilling). He's an art student in East Germany, learning about Socialist Realism, the only "acceptable" form of art under the new regime. He falls in love with Ellie (Paula Beer), a fashion student, whose father just happens to be Carl. Neither man knows what the other's connection to Elisabeth was.

That unknown connection quickly fades into the background, although Carl's beliefs about genetics is turned on his daughter upon learning that she and Kurt are a couple. Then, that story thread disappears, as Carl flees the country when his Russian helper is dismissed from his post in Germany. The rest of the narrative follows a straightforward, biographical path, with Kurt becoming disillusioned with the restrictions of the country's politics and deciding whether or not to escape to West Germany. Much of the movie's political undercurrent is just that—below the surface, to be culled from the juxtaposition that opening scene at the exhibit of banned art and the strict adherence to one kind of art in Soviet-controlled East Germany.

An escape occurs, though, for Kurt and his wife, as well as for the movie's building of thematic and narrative tension. In West Germany, Kurt begins to find his own voice as an artist, and there are impressive, isolated scenes of him exploring this new freedom and trying to determine what he wants to say with his art. After spending so much time in the confined realm of the political climate in Kurt's homeland and of the story's own machinations, it's genuinely freeing to see Donnersmarck examine Kurt's developing inspiration. His art professor (played by Oliver Masucci) helps by relating the story of his own art, inspired by his brief time in the German air force, suffering, and discovering what really matters in life.

There is a certain power to the film's mounting climax, which brings the past of Kurt's family into focus, as he creates art that replicates that past on canvas but, with strokes of the brush, makes it out-of-focus. The conflicts and tensions that have been building for the entire movie are released but, because of the secretive nature of the characters' connections, aren't exactly addressed. It's strange that Never Look Away, which spends so much time stating so much outright, ends with such ambiguity. We can appreciate it, while also wishing the movie's approach until then had matched it.

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