Never Look Away (2018)

NEVER LOOK AWAY  (2018)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
    Tom Schilling, Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer,
    Saskia Rosendahl, Oliver Masucci, Hanno Koffler
Thirty years of troubled German history reflected in the life of an artist, from the Nazi era to 1966. As a young boy, Kurt Barnert sees his beloved but troubled Aunt Elisabeth whisked away in an ambulance. She's been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and for the would-be engineers of a genetically perfect master race, that makes her disposable. The boy never sees her again. A few years later, he sees the Allied planes fly over on their way to bomb Dresden. He can see the city burning from his house. After the war, he studies art and finds work as a painter, making signs and then moving on to heroic depictions of proletarian solidarity, socialist realism being the only kind of art the rulers of the German Democratic Republic want to see. He meets a fellow student, a seamstress and textile artist who reminds him of Elisabeth - her name is also Elisabeth - and she makes him a suit and they fall in love and eventually marry. They escape to the West and he begins to explore the world of modern art - a taboo in the East - searching for a way to express what he can't articulate but feels compelled to say. Through all this, he's hounded and haunted by his wife's father, a respected gynecologist whose monstrous behavior over decades has horrifying consequences for both the aunt and the second Elisabeth. It's a long movie - over three hours - but doesn't feel like it. It drags only briefly in the middle, when Kurt's modernist colleagues at the academy in Dusseldorf trade philosophical abstractions about art. It's beautifully shot (by Caleb Deschanel) and scored (by Max Richter), and it's finally a movie about how art can sometimes transcend politics by expressing what can't be expressed any other way, and why sometimes we need it to.