Susanna Nicchiarelli (2017)

I’d never heard of Nico, 1988.  The friends I was staying with in York recommended the film and we watched it together.  The date in the title is the year the rock singer Nico died, at the age of forty-nine.  The action in writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli’s biopic, after a brief opening flashback to the protagonist’s wartime childhood, concentrates on the last two years of her life.  Drug addiction features prominently in the story.  Another theme is Nico’s feelings of guilt-ridden failure as a mother and anxiety about her son Ari (also a heroin addict).  There’s some common ground here with Rupert Goold’s Judy.  It was an interesting coincidence to see the two in such quick succession; as I watched Nicchiarelli’s film, I couldn’t help comparing and contrasting it with Goold’s.

One big difference is that I know plenty about Judy Garland’s life and work, and next to nothing about Nico’s, except for the Velvet Underground connection.  (As she irritably keeps telling people in Nico, 1988, that connection was a short-lived prelude to her much longer solo career.)  I must have heard her voice over the years but I don’t know it.  That gave Trine Dyrholm, who plays her, an advantage over Renée Zellweger:  I couldn’t judge Dyrholm against the real thing.  What’s more, I didn’t know beforehand that she was a singer at all, which made that aspect of her performance revelatory as well as powerful.  (My friends, who do know the original music, were impressed by the accuracy of Dyrholm’s version of Nico’s singing voice.)

At the start, Nico is doing a local radio interview in Manchester.  The camera is close in on her as she tensely smokes a cigarette, nervously runs a hand through her hair.  Driving away from the studios with Richard (John Gordon Sinclair), a night club owner and her de facto manager, she angrily instructs him to call her not Nico but ‘by my real name, Christa’.  (She was born Christa Päffgen in Cologne in 1938.)  In other words, Nicchiarelli starts by presenting an almost generic image of a troubled, temperamental celebrity.  But she and Dyrholm go on to build a persuasively individual character.

A disadvantage of my ignorance of the subject:  I felt, for a while at least, starved of context, especially as Nicchiarelli uses signposts sparingly.  After the ‘Berlin, 1945’ prologue, there are just the three year indicators (1986-87-88) and no indications of place, although the setting of the action changes several times.  A feeling of égarement is apt enough, though, and increasingly effective.  The locations are variously alienating:  a shabby Manchester flat; an Italian hotel where rooms don’t materialise (another Judy moment); a clammy performance venue in Prague.  These combine to give a sense of, and let us share a little, Nico’s deracination.  They also reinforce the import of the opening Berlin sequence in which the young Christa (Alina Ionescu) watches the city of her childhood burn.  (At the age of two, she moved with her mother and grandfather from Cologne to the outskirts of Berlin.)

Except for ‘Nature Boy’, the songs had no previous associations for me – which made it easier to believe that Dyrholm, in singing them, was expressing Nico’s offstage state of mind as much as interpreting the words and music.  I preferred her singing to the songs:  none of Nico’s numbers caught my interest in the way another song new to me did – ‘Big in Japan’ by the German synth-pop group Alphaville, one of several contemporary pieces that Nicchiarelli uses on the soundtrack. (Trine Dyrholm reprises this number over the closing credits.)

The dialogue is in English throughout.  It’s striking that Nicchiarelli gets more natural acting from the non-British members of the supporting cast than she does from the native English speakers.  The former include Sandor Funtek (as Ari), Anamaria Marinca and Thomas Trabacchi.  John Gordon Sinclair is OK but he seems almost cartoonish beside these others – ditto Karina Fernandez.  Nico’s impending demise is telegraphed by moments near the end when she urges someone to take care of her son and tells someone else they’ll be working together again soon.  The final sequence works well, though.  Nico simply gets her bicycle out and moves off camera.  The initiated will already know that, on holiday with Ari in Ibiza, she fell off her bike, hit her head and died of a brain haemorrhage.   For this viewer, her low-key exit had almost mysterious impact, after all the preceding, prevailing angst of this strong film.

31 October 2019