Mark Reviews Movies: NICO, 1988

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 9, 2018

Christa Päffgen started being known as Nico when she was a teenager, taking the name while she was a model. She started acting a few years later and, from there, became a singer. All the while, she was hobnobbing with famous people in Europe. She had a son in her early 20s. The father's identity was unknown, although a significant clue comes from the people who later adopted the boy—the parents of actor Alain Delon. She became a muse of Andy Warhol in New York City, sang a few songs with the Velvet Underground, and became known as "Lou Reed's femme fatale."

Writer/director Susanna Nicchiarelli's biography of the underground star skips over all of this. Nico, 1988 begins with the bombings of Berlin at the end of World War II in Europe, where, from a distant farm, a young Christa watches the eerie sight of a dark night turned to dusk by the distant flames of a city ablaze. The film then whirls through Nico's career by way of a montage of archival footage—images of Times Square and Warhol's face rush by with little pausing to take them in.

Its narrative finally, if briefly, lands in Ibiza on July 18, 1988, as Nico (Trine Dyrholm) smokes a cigarette in the kitchen of a rented house, before telling an unseen companion that she's going to go for a bike ride. Those who know Nico's story also know that she wouldn't return from that outing.

Most people likely won't, and Nicchiarelli's film doesn't particularly care whether or not one knows anything about Nico's life until a person is watching the isolated story of the film. The Nico of the film's timeframe, from 1986 until her death, doesn't care too much about the past, either. At least, that's what she tells any stranger who doesn't show the proper respect for her in her present state and has the misfortune of asking about her career until this point.

One can understand the allure, given her storied history, but the first scene of the story proper has a radio DJ making the mistake of referring to her relationship with Reed, asking Nico about the Velvet Underground, and otherwise ignoring the fact that she's there to talk about her still-going solo career. This will not stand.

We see two versions of Nico in this film: the private woman, who does talk about the past when she isn't trying to forget it with heroin, and the public persona, who performs on stage as if in a trance. Was Nico a good singer? Such things are relative, especially since she made some strange rock music, in which things such as rhythm and pitch were secondary to the attitude of the vocals. There was also the matter of her thick German accent, which came through clearly as she sometimes barked away at lyrics in English.

Fans may scoff at the idea of Dyrholm performing the songs on her own, instead of Nicchiarelli finding actual recordings over which to dub the actress' voice. Such an opinion would be unfortunate. Dyrholm does more than a fine job mimicking Nico's vocal stylings, and more importantly, there's an immediacy to the attitude of the performances that easily could be lost by the act of dubbing.

In case it isn't clear by now, the film is entirely about that attitude. It's rebellious in its structure, which doesn't follow the standard trajectory of biographical movies, but beneath that rebellious spirt, there's a soul yearning to be heard and understood. Nicchiarelli's screenplay completely ignores events of any real significance, instead following Nico, her manager and the manager's wife, and her band as they tour Europe in 1986.

Nico is on a downslide here, realizing that she'll never be as popular on her own as she was occasionally singing and mostly playing the tambourine with a famous band. Her heroin habit has become more of a necessity than an addiction. The skin near her ankle—her usual spot to inject the needle—is a big bruise, and part of the tour is making certain that there's always a supply of heroin available, lest she or her guitarist get sick or pass out on stage from withdrawal symptoms. Everything looks bad, except when Nico is in the zone on stage. Even those moments are fleeting, either because she lashes out at bandmate and the audience or because the Communist authorities in Czechoslovakia arrive to stop an illegal show.

That's essentially the flow of the film, which moves from London—where Nico's manager Richard (John Gordon Sinclair) has hired a band—to Paris—where the singer wonders if she can have her son Ari (Sandor Funtek) released from of a psychiatric facility after a recent suicide attempt—to Italy—where she has her fit of rage on stage—and to Prague—where the lack of availability of heroin gives her a reason to yell about damn Communists (She doesn't say, "damn"). All the while, she offers some details about her past to her few trusted confidants, but nostalgia offers little solace. She was famous, beautiful, and miserable then. She is less famous, aging, and miserable now. What, really, is the difference?

The film's revealing of information is necessary, although it sometimes feels a bit too planned amidst the loose structure of the plot. Nonetheless, Dyrholm's performance is equal parts fierce and melancholy, and Nicchiarelli captures her subject's attitude in form and storytelling. Perhaps the most obvious subversion of the usual is how, instead of showing us a famous figure's downfall, Nico, 1988 suggests that its protagonist is on the rise—until cruel fate steps in.

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