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.
