Never Look Away
Werk ohne Autor
Work Without Author

After a disastrous detour into Hollywood with The Tourist (2010), German writer/producer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck returns to form with Never Look Away. While not anywhere as magnificent as his début—the Oscar, BAFTA, and César Award winning political thriller The Lives of Others (2006)—Never Look Away is easily the best picture of 2018. Loosely based on the life of the German painter Gerhard Richter, who has vehemently rejected this movie as a gross distortion of his biography, the film centres on a fictional art student named Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling), Kurt navigates his way through, and at many points epitomizes, thirty years of changing German ideology. His life is intertwined in myriad ways with Professor Carl Seeband (Sebastian Koch), a former Nazi who was in charge of a eugenics program that sterilized and exterminated thousands of his countrymen deemed mentally ill.

At three hours and eight minutes, one might assume Never Look Away is an epic wartime drama, but it is actually an unabashed, old-fashioned melodrama of the highest order, set during pre- and post-WWII Germany. The genre barely exists in cinema anymore, as long-form television has all but taken it over. Yet von Donnersmarck reminds us why this style of storytelling is so well suited to the cinematic format. Never Look Away is not a sweeping saga with a cast of thousands, but an intimate narrative centred on a few noteworthy individuals and told over a significant duration of time. It has a lot to say about the power and purpose of high art but presents these ideas via the common medium of heightened, sentimentalized popular entertainment. 

I’m not a painter myself, so I can’t comment on how well the artistic process is represented here, but I have suffered through too many unsuccessful movies that attempt to capture how artists devise and execute their work. This film, while sometimes relying on clichés and familiar shorthand, places the viewer into the mind of an artist who, like many gifted creative types, doesn’t fully understand how or what he’s bringing into being or the full significance and resonance of his efforts. But this doesn’t limit the incalculable power his work wields. 

It’s unfortunate that Schilling is no Ulrich Mühe (the incomparable star of The Lives of Others). Were von Donnersmarck able to place an actor of Mühe’s caliber in the role of Kurt Barnert, he might have twice captured lightning in a bottle. Still, Schilling is more than adequate as the dashing young lead in this story, and the director surrounds him with a striking supporting cast. Sebastian Koch, the romantic persecuted playwright hero of The Lives of Others, plays Professor Seeband in one of the best villainous performances in a good long while. Paula Beer (The Poll Diaries, Frantz, Transit) plays Ellie, the young woman Kurt falls in love with. And Saskia Rosendahl (Lore), playing Kurt’s free-spirited Aunt Elisabeth in the opening passages, haunts the picture with her luminous presence. 

The forty-five-year-old von Donnersmarck is a classical, old-fashioned storyteller; and Never Look Away is the kind of movie that has largely gone out of style. It is cerebral yet passionate, precisely engineered without being contrived, epic in length but intimate in scope. It will no doubt be pilloried (with no sense of irony) as too long, too unfocused, and too pleased with itself by the same critics who lavish praise on the geyser of meandering, self-important, and all too often unresolved, high-brow soap operas that constitute what has been dubbed “the third golden age of television.” But unlike all those indistinguishable TV dramas, Never Look Away is no mere endless assemblage of well-executed scenes and bland filler. It is a solid picture with an exact, though unexpected, narrative arc that tells a riveting story with cogent, timely themes that are clearly defined without being simplistic.

Never Look Away is far from a masterpiece. The production design by Silke Buhr (The Lives of Others, The Poll Diaries), costumes by Gabriele Binder (The Lives of Others, In the Land of Blood and Honey) and, most notably, the photography by master cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, The Right Stuff, The Passion of the Christ) all possess the spotless, sweat-free, museum-like crispness that undermines so many period pieces made in the era of digital filmmaking. The early scenes of bombed out Dresden look impressive but artificial. More successful is the way intimate scenes are photographed, in that the lighting and presentation of how these characters look at home, at work, and while naked evokes the portraiture, socialist-realist murals, and artist models that populate the picture. But the “lived-in feeling” of authenticity required for a great historical film, which The Lives of Others embodies so well, is missing here. And many of the key moments in von Donnersmarck’s screenplay don’t land with sufficient force to propel the viewer effortlessly from beat to beat. 

But Never Look Away is perhaps the best example of how so many of 2018’s most memorable movies (A Star is Born, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Cold War, Crazy Rich Asians, First Reformed, Roma, Old Man & the Gun, and more) harken back to various bygone eras of cinema without feeling the need to comment on the movies of those times nor meticulously recreate their style or tropes.  This imperfect yet deeply satisfying yarn was my favorite picture of the year.