Movie Review—Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “Never Look Away”

Never Look Away
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck 
Now playing in New York
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Cai Cohrs and Saskia Rosendahl in Never Look Away

No one can accuse a director with a name like Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck of restraint. The German director of Never Look Away—a magnificent 189-minute epic encompassing Nazis, Communism and modern art—proved with his debut feature, the Oscar-winning Best Foreign Film The Lives of Others (2006), that he is unafraid to tackle serious and complex subject matter: but even that expertly-made and incisive dramatization of how the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, destroyed ordinary citizens was only a prelude to the sweeping audaciousness of Donnersmarck’s absorbing new film.

Based loosely on the life and career of modern German artist Gerhard Richter, Never Look Away is a biopic that’s crammed with every kind of melodramatic and comedic, romantic and tragic, cinematic and theatrical trope; what’s amazing is how Donnersmarck builds them into an exhilarating portrait of an artist as a young man. 

The film opens at an exhibit of degenerate art in Dresden that a Nazi party member gleefully demolishes, as our protagonist—six-year-old Kurt Barnert (the charmingly wide-eyed Cai Cohrs)—has his own artistic sensibilities supported by his angelic aunt Elisabeth (an elegant Saskia Rosendahl), who is torn from the family after erratic behavior renders her an undesirable to the Nazis. Her last words, mouthed to Kurt as she’s taken away, are the film’s evocative title, and throughout his life he takes them to heart.

Tom Schilling, Paula Beer and Sebastian Koch in Never Look Away

Shrewdly, Donnersmarck never returns to her words again, a rare moment of subtlety in a film that prefers the big-hearted moment, the florid gesture, the violent incident, the unmistakable symbol and the visual metaphor as it takes in Kurt’s life from the Allied bombing of Dresden and postwar rebuild to the stifling sameness of sanctimonious East German art schools and the freedom afforded by Dusseldorf when Kurt (played as an adult by the likably pleasant Tom Schilling) and his wife Ellie (Paula Beer, and tremendous) make their breathless escape to artistic and personal liberty in the West.

Nazism makes up a big chunk of the film’s narrative and psychological concerns: Professor Carl Seeband, Ellie’s beloved father, was not only one of the party elite but also a doctor who damned many young women to barrenness and even horrific death, including Elisabeth. Sebastian Koch plays this damnable villain with his usual suavity, helping to smooth over the worst excesses of his character, like giving his own daughter an abortion in an attempt to destroy her relationship with Kurt.

Donnersmarck never looks away from such horrifying images as the awful annihilation of mentally ill young women and the brutal deaths of civilians during Allied bombings; then there are the easily mockable—but sweetly naïve—bookending sequences of Elisabeth and Kurt responding ecstatically to the simultaneous horn blowing of local bus drivers, which have to be seen to be believed. 

The director makes his protagonist’s license to paint whatever he sees, however desultory—Kurt’s fame skyrockets when he creates paintings based on photographs of his family, turning them into blurry but powerful reminders of sordid German history—into a visual mantra (the glistening cinematography is by Caleb Deschanel), as every single sentimental and bombastic moment of Never Look Away becomes an essential part of the monumental story being told.