Never Look Away: You simply can't!

Never Look Away (2018) • View trailer 
4.5 stars. Rated R, for graphic nudity, sexual content, dramatic intensity and brief violent images
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.1.19

He who saves one life, saves the world entire.

It therefore stands to reason that he who destroys one life, destroys the world entire. And he who destroys many lives, destroys a galaxy of worlds.

When finally given the opportunity to create any sort of art that he desires, Kurt (Tom
Schilling) finds it difficult to reverse years of the repressive limitations he was forced
to observe, lest he come to the attention of the wrong sort of people.

Hold that thought.

German writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Never Look Away is like getting thoroughly absorbed by a sweeping historical novel … and I mean that in the best possible way.

Von Donnersmarck previously brought us 2006’s mesmerizing The Lives of Others, which deservedly won the Oscar for that year’s best foreign film, and also should have been nominated — at the very least — for screenplay.

He’s clearly intrigued by what prompted the madness that infected his country during the Nazi years, and the repression that followed amid the subsequent blockaded decades, prior to the barriers coming down in November 1989 (and the Berlin Wall’s destruction, two years later). 

The Lives of Others focused on a Stasi (secret police) operative inexorably drawn into the desires and behavior of those he surveilled over the course of several years. Never Look Away takes a much longer view of how one young man’s life becomes woven — without his awareness — into the fabric of a heinous Nazi loyalist.

Von Donnersmarck opens his new film in 1937 Dresden, as 6-year-old Kurt Barnert (Cai Cohrs) is taken by his beloved young aunt, Elisabeth (Saskia Rosendahl), to see the touring Entartete Kunst (“Degenerate Art”) exhibit at a nearby museum. Von Donnersmarck takes his time with this sequence, as cinematographer Caleb Deschanel’s camera slowly pans over works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Ludwig Kirchner and others, while a smug Nazi guide contemptuously dismisses everything as a “disgusting sign of mental illness.”

But young Kurt is transfixed, with whispered encouragement from Elisabeth. “Never look away,” she tells the boy. Never be afraid of something new, something different, something challenging.

Alas, her three-word mantra soon takes on an entirely different meaning.

Elisabeth is a free spirit — enraptured by art, beauty and music — at a time when such behavior is just this side of criminal, and cannot be tolerated. She’s also a little bit mad, unable to reconcile her bohemian nature with the shivering excitement experienced when, as a Nazi youth party member, she hands a bouquet to Adolf Hitler.

Her instability is diagnosed by the family doctor, who reports her case to party medical officials; she’s sentenced to a “clinic” where all such “defectives” are sterilized, in order to prevent the Aryan bloodline from being tainted. (No, such fates weren’t restricted to Jews.) This facility is run by renowned gynecologist Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch, well remembered from The Lives of Others), an immaculately garbed specialist — who insists on being called “Professor Seeband” — whose graceful, debonair manner conceals a true monster.

Koch’s performance is chilling, for the degree to which Seeband’s loathsome Nazi philosophy is concealed behind such an aristocratic bearing, and the calm manner — when circumstances invite candor — with which he justifies his shocking beliefs and actions.

A few years pass, during which Seeband is granted another title: Medical Coordinator of the Dresden Region for the Euthanasia Program.

Von Donnersmarck continues to drop us briefly into isolated events during the war years, while adding further details to key supporting characters. The war concludes; Seeband is arrested by a Soviet major (Evgeniy Sidikhin) placed in charge of this German region, who is truly disgusted by his prisoner’s place in the defeated Nazi regime. But fate deals Seeband a lucky hand, and he isn’t placed in front of a firing squad.

Kurt has matured into an East German university art student (now played by Tom Schilling) who becomes proficient in the “Soviet/social realism” style demanded by his country’s new Marxist overlords. Kurt is the apple in the eye of his mentoring professor: a pragmatist who understands artistic curiosity but cautions against the self-absorption of “me, me, me.”

Von Donnersmarck fills his narrative with cruel irony: Kurt’s father (Jörg Schüttauf, in a tragic performance), once a renowned academic who joined the Nazi party solely under duress — “It’ll be your capital, after the war,” his wife had insisted, at the time — now cannot find work in this new world, damned by the stigma of such membership.

But happiness flourishes, even in this repressive environment: Kurt falls in love with a fashion design student also named Elisabeth. He cannot bear to call her that, so she grants him her nickname, Ellie (Paula Beer). They become inseparable, even as Kurt chafes under the relentlessly restrictive sameness of Soviet realism.

Timing is everything, and it becomes clear that the two Germanys are about to be divided forcefully. And so, one fateful day, Kurt and Ellie escape to the West via a simple, short railway trip to Düsseldorf; they travel without luggage, in order to conceal their decision not to return. 

Adapting quickly to these new surroundings, Kurt is accepted into Düsseldorf’s legendary progressive art school, Kunstakademie. But finding his “voice” in such an uninhibited environment proves difficult, if not impossible; eventually, inexorably, he’s drawn back to his childhood, where a subconscious artistic muse encourages confrontations with painful memories.

It’s this film’s “There’s no place like home” moment: Paint what you know.

Seeband, meanwhile, has flourished — outrageously, impossibly, cruelly — having concealed his own past. Our teeth grind at this injustice.

As the story proceeds, the orbits of these three characters — Kurt, Ellie and Seeband — become intertwined in a manner that’s every bit as compelling as the various interactions I still vividly recall from The Lives of Others. Indeed, these two films are companion chapters of a massive narrative (and I suspect Von Donnersmarck hasn’t finished yet).

Schilling delivers a richly subtle performance. Kurt keeps close counsel — having learned, early on, the dangers of too much candor — and his thoughts frequently are conveyed via Schilling’s thoughtful silences and penetrating gaze. Kurt has an artist’s alertness and awareness; he misses nothing. 

Most notably, Schilling is the sublime instrument by which Von Donnersmarck reveals the act of artistic inspiration and creation. Lengthy segments of this film are devoted to chalk sketches and painted brush strokes, as we literally watch art being created — nay, revealed — before our eyes.

Beer’s Ellie is the epitome of a devoted mate: a woman both sure of herself, and of her love for Kurt. Beer is luminescent at times, yet always grounded and practical. She and Schilling share a degree of intimacy — captured sensitively by Von Donnersmarck and Deschanel’s camera — that, at times, makes us feel like uncomfortable voyeurs.

Oliver Masucci is a hoot as Kurt’s Kunstakademie mentor, Antonius van Verten: an eccentric iconoclast who, eventually, reveals his own mind-blowing back-story. (Van Verten seems modeled on German sculptor and installation artist Joseph Beuys, just as Von Donnersmarck acknowledges that Kurt is inspired strongly by German painter Gerhard Richter.)

Rosendahl’s performance as young Kurt’s Aunt Elisabeth is shattering, giving this character a degree of verisimilitude that makes the long first act veryhard to watch. Hanno Koffler is a hoot as Kurt’s best friend and fellow student, Günther, who relentlessly hammers nails into furniture and huge pieces of wood, a la Günther Uecker.

Indeed, one of this film’s rare bits of humor comes when Günther tours the newly accepted Kurt through the Kunstakademie corridors and studios, where all manner of young men and women do utterly bizarre “works” in the name of Abstract Expressionism. (We’ve moved, by this point, to 1961.)

Deschanel’s cinematography is just as important as Von Donnersmarck’s narrative, as we’re propelled through this sweeping story; the secretive warmth of Kurt and Ellie’s late-night coupling is just as breathtaking as the glorious vistas of German countryside. Max Richter’s spare score makes excellent — powerful — use of quiet, impeccably placed notes and chords.

At 188 minutes, Never Look Away is an investment, but one well worth the effort. This is grand, glorious filmmaking by a writer/director in total command of his craft: one who knows precisely how to keep us under his spell, at all times.