Monthly Archives: July 2019

  • Never Look Away

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Werk ohne Autor

    Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (2018)

    Never Look Away is the film Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck might have been expected to make in the wake of The Lives of Others, his multi-award-winning debut feature of 2006.  It is Donnersmarck’s first German picture since then but it’s his third feature.  In between, came his curious Hollywood venture, The Tourist (2010), starring Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie – a romantic-thriller-cum-comedy that received mostly bad reviews but turned into a sizeable commercial hit.  (I’ve not seen it.)  What is it that makes this new work a predictable follow-up to a major international succès d’estime (which also made money)?   The combination of its upfront big ideas and inordinate length:  a film-maker who knows people have decided s/he’s a voice worth listening to, may be tempted to abuse that status and abandon economy.  That’s what Donnersmarck has done here.  At 188 minutes (nearly an hour longer than The Lives of Others), Never Look Away is excessively long.  It’s often clumsy too.  But the film is never a hardship to watch and it tells an absorbing story.

    By the time Never Look Away appeared in late 2018, it was already publicly controversial.  Although it’s a work of fiction, Donnersmarck’s original inspiration was Jürgen Schreiber’s 2005 book about the German painter Gerhard Richter, which brought to light that Richter’s aunt, murdered by the Nazis when she developed schizophrenia and the subject of one of Richter’s best-known art pieces, was euthanised at a hospital whose director was an SS doctor who later became Richter’s father-in-law.  Richter had long been aware of this man’s SS past but it seems he discovered the particular connection only as a result of Schreiber’s research.  As Dana Goodyear explained in a New Yorker profile of Donnersmarck in January 2019, he was keen to develop Never Look Away in close consultation with Richter, whom he admires.  To his delighted surprise, the famous artist responded positively to his overtures.  The two men met often and Richter consented to the recording of what were in some cases very revealing interviews.

    Donnersmarck says that he read the full completed screenplay to Richter for his approval, which seemed to be forthcoming until he offered a private screening of the finished film.  Richter said no.  His subsequent reactions were increasingly hostile.  When Dana Goodyear approached Richter, he replied to her as follows:

    ‘What to say – very soon after [Donnersmarck’s] first or second visit I told him clearly that I would not approve of a movie about Gerhard Richter.  I also suggested that the protagonist might have another profession, like a writer or a musician for example, as the family history that he wanted to tell did not necessarily need a painter as such.  He left all his options open and I gave him something in writing stating that he was explicitly not allowed to use or publish either my name or any of my paintings.  He reassured me to respect my wishes. … But in reality, he has done everything to link my name to his movie, and the press was helping him to the best of its ability.  Fortunately, the most important newspapers here [in Germany] reviewed his concoction very skeptically and critically.  Nevertheless, he managed to abuse and grossly distort my biography!  I don’t want to say more about this.’

    The New Yorker piece is a compelling, somewhat alienating read.  Donnersmarck and Richter come across as king-size egos:  the former is more annoying until Goodyear’s focus switches to the latter.  It seems that Richter turned against Donnersmarck rather as he’d turned against Jürgen Schreiber years before.  If Richter was aware of Donnersmarck’s intentions and, later, conversant with the screenplay, his suggestion that the film’s protagonist might have a different creative profession is baffling:  the visual art element of Never Look Away is nothing if not intrinsic to the piece.  On the other hand, Donnersmarck’s professed resolve to protect Richter’s identity rings false:

    ‘Whenever the conversation turns to you, I will say that it is specifically not a bio-pic of Gerhard Richter but the story of the fictional painter Kurt Barnert. I will call the film something like a spiritual biography of our country, which was enriched by the biographies of other artists as well. I will say that the elements of your biography were merely the starting point for a free, fictionalized, story.’

    If Donnersmarck needed only a ‘starting point’, already supplied by Schreiber’s profile, why did he gather and record so much personal information from Richter?   (This note won’t, by the way, detail similarities and differences between the latter’s life and work, and the events and art in the film.)  Donnersmarck’s description of Never Look Away as ‘a spiritual biography of our country’ is apt, though:  that’s what his picture primarily is.  This is only speculation but it’s not hard to imagine that Richter might be angry to see his own biography and the account of an artist’s creative development subjugated to a melodramatising of the psychological experience of a generation of Germans.

    The action starts in 1937 and ends in 1966.  As a young boy in Dresden, Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) is taken to an exhibition of ‘Degenerate Art’ by Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), the beautiful and wilful young aunt to whom he’s devoted.  When Kurt later witnesses Elisabeth seated nude at the piano, she tells him to ‘never look away’ since ‘everything that is true holds beauty in it’.  Elisabeth’s eccentric behaviour leads to her being diagnosed as schizophrenic.  Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch) is a gynaecology professor and senior member of the SS medical corps.  As director of the clinic to which Elisabeth is referred, Seeband oversees her sterilisation and transport to the prison camp where she’s killed.  In 1945, Seeband, arrested by Soviet forces, is himself placed in a prison camp.  The wife of high-ranking Soviet officer Muravyov (Evgeniy Sidikhin) is experiencing a difficult and dangerous labour.  Seeband offers to assist; thanks to him, both mother and baby survive.  In gratitude, Muravyov releases Seeband, destroys the records of his crimes and continues to help conceal his past for years to come.

    In the early 1950s, Kurt (Tom Schilling) studies painting at art school in Dresden – now part of East Germany.  He falls in love with Elisabeth (Paula Beer), a fashion design student, who shares not just a name but, from Kurt’s point of view, a kind of spiritual connection with his late aunt.  Ellie, as she’s known, is Seeband’s daughter.  Her father has successfully resumed a medical academic career and is now a dutiful socialist, as the regime requires, but hasn’t shed his long-standing belief in the importance of ‘hereditary health’.  He sees Kurt as genetically inferior to Ellie and does his best to destroy their relationship.  When she becomes pregnant, Seeband performs surgery on his daughter.  What he claims to be a straightforward abortion is designed to prevent her bearing children in future.

    Kurt and Ellie, who are deeply in love, marry.  He completes his studies and starts to paint for a living.  In East Germany, his opportunities are limited to works of socialist realism and, though an able practitioner, Kurt feels creatively constrained.  When Muravyov is eventually transferred back to the Soviet Union, Seeband fears for his safety and moves to West Germany with his wife (Ina Weisse).  For different reasons, Kurt and Ellie follow in early 1961, shortly before the erection of the Berlin Wall.  Kurt lies about his age (he’s thirty but looks younger) to gain admission to Düsseldorf’s famously radical art school.  His charismatic teacher (Oliver Masucci) perceives his underlying talent but is convinced that Kurt’s training in realistic figurative painting is preventing him from truly expressing himself.

    The artistic breakthrough comes when Kurt reads a newspaper report about the capture of a Nazi doctor called Burghart Kroll (Rainer Bock).  Unbeknown to Kurt, Kroll was his father-in-law’s former superior in the SS medical corps.  Kurt makes use of his aptitude for realistic drawing to copy a newspaper photograph of Bock onto canvas; he then applies a sfumato technique that makes the image distinctive and mysterious.  He enriches the composition by working in Seeband’s passport photo and family album snaps of his aunt Elisabeth.  Kurt knows from Ellie that her father was in the SS; he doesn’t know what Seeband did to his aunt.  When Seeband sees the resulting collage, he is devastated; hurrying out of Kurt’s studio, he also takes leave of the film.  After years of infertility and early miscarriages, Ellie gives birth to a child.  Kurt’s nude painting of his pregnant wife is the centrepiece of his first show in 1966.  He takes questions at a press conference, his smiling wife and baby daughter looking on.

    The story reads as a metaphor for the struggle of Germans born in the Hitler years to overcome their national inheritance.  Ellie’s inability to have children, the result of treatment by her Nazi father, renders her futureless.  The engagement of Kurt’s with Seeband’s identity not only effects a creative advance; it also breaks the spell.  Although this is a remarkable, ambitious premise for a screen drama, it’s a structurally familiar one in that it depends on a single decisive turning point.  And while Never Look Away is inspired by truth-that’s-stranger-than-fiction – a fact of Gerhard Richter’s life that’s both a breathtaking coincidence and symbolically rich – Donnersmarck arguably dilutes the power of this by relying too on chance events of his own invention, like Seeband’s intervention to save Muravyov’s wife and baby, in order to shape and sharpen the plot.

    A brief montage describing the deaths of German soldiers on the front line and civilians in the bombing of Dresden has a startling realism that sits uncomfortably with more clichéd elements of the direction.  Elisabeth’s performance at the piano is anticipated by the camera tracking a trail of her discarded clothes from the entrance to the room.  Donnersmarck does exactly the same to introduce Kurt’s and Ellie’s first love-making.  You’re left wondering if Germans maybe aren’t as tidy-minded as popularly supposed.  Kurt’s father Johann (Jörg Schüttauf) is no great supporter of the Nazis:  when the family arrive at a hotel and the clerk on reception greets them with ‘Heil Hitler!’, Johann returns the salute with a joking ‘Drei Liter!’   Even so, he’s a card-carrying member of the party and in due course punished for that.  A schoolteacher before the war, Johann is reduced to cleaning staircases once it’s over and commits suicide.  Seeband discovers this looking into Kurt’s suitability for his daughter’s hand.  When Kurt can’t support himself and Ellie through painting, his father-in-law contemptuously arranges a part-time cleaning job for him at the hospital where Seeband works – as if to try and break the younger man.  There’s an immediate resonance to this, of course, but the device is a bit pat.  Once he meets Ellie, Kurt becomes very suddenly separated from the remainder of his own family.  I wasn’t clear if Donnersmarck was making a point by this or if it was simply a matter of narrative convenience to him.

    This ‘work of fiction’ is, however, a stronger art film than most artist biopics.  Some of the painting sequences are dramatically eloquent.  After Kurt’s defection to the West, his mentor in Dresden (Hans-Uwe Bauer) watches tearfully as a socialist realism mural he worked on is whitewashed over.  When Kurt arrives in Düsseldorf, Günther (Hanno Koffler), the fellow student who becomes his friend, shows him round the art school.  The sequence, though overlong, dynamically conveys the excitement that the place communicates to Kurt.  The visualisation and cutting of his lightbulb moment with the newspaper photographs of Burghard Kroll and subsequent construction of the collage elevate the episode.  (Caleb Deschanel is Donnersmarck’s cinematographer and Patricia Rommel his editor.)   Although Seeband’s stunned exit when he sees the results is melodramatic, this is as far as the film goes in having Kurt explicitly confront Ellie’s father.  Donnersmarck does well to omit any public revelation of Seeband’s past.  By leaving uncertain how much Kurt actually comes to know, the film hints at the idea that the pursuit of artistic truth can penetrate beyond knowledge of facts.

    While Never Look Away received Oscar nominations for Best Foreign Language Film (in a strong year) and Best Cinematography, its critical reception has been mixed.  Some reviewers aren’t impressed by Tom Schilling in the lead role and though I liked him, I can see why.  Actually in his mid-thirties, Schilling seems much younger:  he’s effortlessly believable as Kurt in his late teens and early twenties.  But his lack of height and slenderness also make him lightweight (he occasionally brings James McAvoy to mind.)   Schilling’s underdog quality qualifies him better for the every(Ger)man aspect of Kurt than for animating his turbulent imagination.  There’s a sizeable stretch of the film when Donnersmarck gives Schilling not only little to say but scarcely any opportunity to react:  he’s almost bound to be inexpressive.  Yet the firm, curious gaze of Cai Cohrs, who plays the six-year-old Kurt, stays with the viewer partly because Tom Schilling never loses it.  As Seeband, Sebastian Koch could hardly be more different.  This actor has a strong presence but lacks a light touch.  As a result, he holds the camera but always comes across as a pretty standard Nazi scientist villain.  The emotionally supple Paula Beer, who impressed in François Ozon’s Frantz (2016), does so again here, even though the role of Ellie is relatively underwritten.

    The German title of the film identifies the story with Gerhard Richter more than the English title.   Wikipedia refers to Richter’s ‘habit to [sic] obfuscate the connections his paintings had to his personal life. This led art historians to refer to his body of work as being “without author” … ‘.  Turning ‘Work without Author’ into Never Look Away may have been a commercial precaution (and the movie has fared well enough at the North American box office).  But it also serves to illustrate another feature of Donnersmarck’s film:  although it’s consistently interesting, it’s also less original than the man who made it seems to think.  This comes across in Sebastian Koch’s characterisation and Max Richter’s admittedly effective score.   It comes across too in the script’s almost corny repetition of his aunt’s advice to the child Kurt.  The picture’s name in the English-speaking world inadvertently announces its conventional nature.

    11 July 2019

  • Midsommar

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ari Aster (2019)

    The Swedish festival at the heart of Midsommar takes place once every ninety years.  The writer-director Ari Aster, alas, is making films rather more often:  I saw this one almost a year to the day after Hereditary.   In that movie, Aster couldn’t wait to get the spooky horror underway and the early stages of Midsommar suggest more of the same.   The build-up to and visual confirmation of the family tragedy that overwhelms the young American heroine Dani (Florence Pugh) are emphatically macabre.  When the action switches to Sweden, as the car carrying Dani, her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and their friends to the festival approaches its destination, Aster shows the surrounding landscape – presumably from the visitors’ point of view and even before they’ve partaken of magic mushrooms – literally upside down.  This premature hyperbole turns out not to be a taste of things to come.  Aster rations the gory, supposedly scary highlights but that turns watching his second feature into something like watching a good many musicals.  You sit waiting for the latest longueur to end, the next big number to start.

    While it comes as no surprise when the smiling Swedes who welcome the newcomers are in due course revealed to be members of a lethal cult, the scheduling of their summer solstice celebrations was still a mystery to me at the end of Midsommar.  The various rituals begin with a couple of early senicides and climax in the impregnation of a young virgin by an outsider, followed by a few more human sacrifices, including most of the tourists.  Is that enough new blood to keep this rural community and their crops going for the best part of a century?   Besides, there’s nothing in the locals’ behaviour to suggest a sense of awestruck privilege that they’re participating in an event so exceptional it can’t be even described as a once-in-a-lifetime experience:  the community, we’re told, believes the natural span of a human life is seventy-two years max.

    Does that mean they’re killing off their senior citizens as standard practice – that when two oldsters plunge to their deaths from a clifftop (one of the pair doesn’t die immediately and has his skull crushed with a mallet to finish the job properly) this is just a more spectacular way than usual of doing things – a festival special?  Is the ninety years thing a front for cult crimes that are actually happening quite frequently?  In that case, why hasn’t the disappearance of previous visitors to the area been noticed or investigated?

    Aster’s debts to Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man (1973) are clear enough, though.  (A major difference between the two films:  at 147 minutes, Midsommar lasts a whole hour longer.)  In The Wicker Man, the police sergeant ritually sacrificed to the islanders’ pagan Celtic gods to ensure a successful harvest, is a devout Christian and a virgin.  Those two things are now such an unlikely combination that the best you can do is give the corresponding character the culturally significant name Christian; and have him, like the sergeant, finally imprisoned in an edifice that goes up in flames.

    This Christian is not a cop but a graduate student in anthropology, as is his friend Josh (William Jackson Harper).  It’s their fellow student Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), who invites the two – along with another classmate Mark (Will Poulter) – to visit Sweden and witness the midsummer celebrations in Pelle’s native community – the Hårga, in Hälsingland.  (The former is fictional, the latter a real province of central Sweden.)  The tensions that flare up between the two anthropologists because Christian decides to copy Josh’s Hårga subject matter are resolved when it’s decided they’ll write a thesis together.  Decided, that is, not by their university but by the Hårga elders, who also stipulate the thesis must contain no names, geographical details or photographs.  Ari Aster must think an unsubstantiated academic thesis is as easy to get away with as a lazy, ridiculous screenplay.   Not that this particular contribution to extending knowledge ever gets to examination.

    To be honest, I went to see Midsommar only because Florence Pugh was in it.  Although Ari Aster has cause to be grateful to her, Pugh’s talents also make matters worse.  This young actress, regardless of the role she’s playing and its context, is able to make you believe in what a character is experiencing emotionally.  The impact of this is particularly strong in the early scenes here.  We’re immediately caught up in Dani’s anxiety about her bi-polar sister – the tenor of her recent emails, her lack of response to Dani’s urgent phone messages.  When she learns the sister has not only committed suicide but killed their parents too, Dani’s anguish is upsettingly credible, in spite of Aster’s insensitive staging of the death scene.  The longer-term effect of Pugh’s dynamic realism, however, is to underline how overscaled is the wintertime trauma that leaves Dani badly in need of a summer holiday.  If she’d already been an orphan and the sister had taken her own life, the disaster might have been closer to the right size.  As it is, the tragedy and Florence Pugh’s reaction to it leave too strong an impression – they cast a long shadow over the continuous sunlight of Scandinavian midsummer and the increasingly daft happenings at the festival.  If Dani more or less forgets what happened to her family, it’s only because Aster does.

    Instead, we’re meant to see the failing relationship between Dani and Christian as the seminal aspect of the American prologue – partly because, according to Wikipedia, Aster himself ‘had experienced a difficult breakup’, partly as another piece of opportunistic misandry.  Her understandable preoccupation with her sister makes Dani not the easiest person in the world to be in a relationship with but Aster, from the start, has it in for Christian and his pal Mark (Will Poulter), who urges him to dump Dani.  Christian stays with her not out of love but through lack of nerve to do otherwise.  The imprint of this arrangement hasn’t a hope of matching the emotional force of the deaths of Dani’s sister and parents.

    Although the film itself seems liable to vindicate Americans who don’t hold with foreign travel, Mark’s other function in the story is to illustrate the typical cocky, ignorant Yank abroad (he can’t even understand why it’s still light late in the evening in Sweden).  Christian reflects an essentially similar national self-confidence less crudely and Jack Reynor does this well.  The die is cast for Christian, though, from the moment we learn that the maiden Maja (Isabelle Grill) fancies him as a suitable candidate for getting her with child.  Reynor merely looks glum for most of the second half of the film, as if weighed down by the knowledge of what he’ll eventually be required to do:  (a) penetrate Maja in front of a large audience of naked female cult members; (b) run starkers round the festival area, with his hands over his privates; (c) lie inside a disembowelled bear, waiting to be sacrificed.

    The Hårga make a total of nine human sacrifices to their sun god(s), including at least four locals and at least four outsiders.  It transpires that Pelle and his brother Ingemar (Hampus Hallberg) lured to the festival, respectively, Christian et al and a couple of British youngsters, Connie (Ellora Torchia) and her fiancé Simon (Archie Madekwe).   Those two are done away with at quite an early stage.  Mark, who offends by urinating on an ancestral tree, and Josh, who sneaks into a temple and tries to photograph a sacred runic text, follow soon after.  The idea that they fail to respect Hårga cultural proprieties is a red herring; the locals need at least four sacrifices from the outside world and have only six people to choose from.  Connie’s and Simon’s only transgression seems to be to want to leave the place once they’ve witnessed the senicides.

    Dani and Christian show a remarkable lack of curiosity about the fate of their companions.  Perhaps it’s the effect of the drugs they unknowingly take, more likely that the incuriosity isn’t the characters’ but the writer-director’s.  (It’s hardly a question of whether Aster has any feeling for the people he puts on screen; he doesn’t care whether his audience has any feeling for them either.)  The first two local sacrifices are the geriatric suicides.  The next two are Ingemar and one of his pals.  They’re selected by lot – balls spinning in a drum, à la FA Cup draw or the National Lottery (‘It could be you …’)

    Florence Pugh is very strong in a sequence in which Dani takes part in a dance-till-you-drop competition with young Hårga women:  her growing euphoria as she stays in the contest may be thanks to the psychotropics her hosts administer but Pugh gets across a powerful sense of Dani’s temporary sense of liberation and abandonment to the dance.  She wins the competition; her prize is to be crowned May Queen (which suggests a different festival but let that pass).  It’s the Queen’s prerogative to select the final human sacrifice Dani chooses Christian, having happened to look through the keyhole of a building as the ceremonial impregnation of Maja was taking place inside.  Dani decides Christian has betrayed her and this is the only way she can get her own back.

    Since Christian was drugged before being taken by the elders to have sex with Maja, this seems a bit unfair.  On the other hand, we know he was too weak to finish with Dani back in America so it’s his fault she came to Sweden anyway.  So, yeah, serves him right!  In the closing stages, Florence Pugh is virtually submerged by the huge robe of flowers in which the Hårga dress their May Queen.  Only her face is visible and, as Dani reaches the verge of psychological collapse, it’s the face of a petulant, tearful child.  But when she contemplates the conflagration of the temple and the human sacrifices inside it, her expression turns to a mysterious smile.  Except that it’s not really mysterious:  female empowerment on screen can happen in the strangest circumstances.

    I’m making Midsommar sound more energetically offensive than it mostly is.  There are long stretches in which the viewer comes close to sharing Dani’s and Christian’s zonked stupor.  Aster and his DP Pawel Pogorzelski make the most of the high-latitude summer solstice, slightly exaggerating the brightness of cloudless days and white nights so that this viewer at first felt he needed protection from the glare.  Once you get used to the effect, however, it becomes a tiresome idea rather than a visual challenge.   It’s unusual to say of a horror movie the sets and costumes were nice but it’s true in this case.  The folk art decoration of the building interiors, the community’s white garb and the women’s floral chaplets are the best things to look at.

    The walls of the temple where the victims are prepared for sacrifice are more worrying, though.  The symbols painted there somewhat suggest swastikas.  With the Hårga into heliolatry, that seems fair enough but I hope it doesn’t give ideas to people who think Ari Aster’s films have to add up to something more than meets the eye.  Such ideas led to praise for Hereditary as a searing account of the breakdown of the American nuclear family.  The cult members’ hyper-Aryan looks and the final hint of holocaust could encourage similarly extravagant inferences from Midsommar.  Let’s look on the bright side, though.  We’re told that Josh, once he’s completed his observations of the Hårga, is heading off to study similar ‘community traditions’ elsewhere in Northern Europe.  Josh is the most conscientious and least dislikeable of the young men in the film.  In a way, it’s a shame he’s taken out as soon as he is.  But at least that would appear to reduce the immediate threat of Midsommar sequels set in England and Germany.

    10 July 2019

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