Movie Review: In the Fade

In the Fade **** / *****

Directed by: Fatih Akin.

Written by: Fatih Akin and Hark Bohm.

Starring: Diane Kruger (Katja Sekerci), Denis Moschitto (Danilo Fava), Numan Acar (Nuri Sekerci), Samia Muriel Chancrin (Birgit), Johannes Krisch (Haberbeck), Ulrich Tukur (Jürgen Möller), Ulrich Brandhoff (André Möller), Hanna Hilsdorf (Edda Möller).

 

Fatih Akin’s In the Fade is neatly (perhaps too neatly) divided into three sections exploring the aftermath of a bombing that leaves a Turkish immigrant in Germany and his young son dead, and his German wife, Katja (Diane Kruger) in a deep state of grieving. All three sections fit neatly into one genre or another, which is perhaps why some have suggested that In the Fade is an overly simplistic film. I don’t think it is – I think Akin is using the genre conventions at each stage as a way to keep the audience engaged, and uses it as a jumping off point to dive deeper into some more disturbing elements.

 

It doesn’t take long for the bomb to explode in the film. After a brief opening scene – shot on a cellphone – capturing the prison wedding between Katja and Nuri (he went there for dealing drugs), the film jumps ahead in time to show Nuri made good – he’s now an accountant (as an accountant, yes, I am bored by the fact that every time a movie needs to show someone is boring, they make them an accountant, but whatever). She drops off their son Rocco with him, and heads to the spa with her pregnant friend. When she returns, the building is a smoking ruin of rubble – her husband son dead.

 

From then on it’s one indignity after another that Katja has to endure during the investigation. The police want to look into his past as a drug dealer – and whether it really was in the past – or perhaps his religion had something to do with, yes? Her mother has the same sort of misguided, misplaced bias against her Muslim husband as well. His parents aren’t any better either – saying perhaps the cruelest thing imaginable at the funeral. She sinks into despair, and ultimately drug use, and entertains thoughts of suicide. Then – partly because of an ID she herself made of a strange woman she saw before the bombing – a couple is arrested and charged with the crime. They are a married couple of Neo-Nazis, targeting immigrants. The second act is all about the trial – and the farther indignities that Katja has to endure, hearing about the injuries her son suffered, having the defense attorney (who is perhaps the most evil character in the film) question everything, in the bluntest, cruelest way imaginable. The third act (spoiler warning, I guess), is in the aftermath of the crime – when with nothing left, Katja has to decide whether to take things into her own hands.

 

Diane Kruger anchors the film – she’s in nearly every scene, even the courtroom scenes when she isn’t saying anything, but has to suffer through anyway. This is the German-born Kruger’s first film that she made in her native country (she speaks German in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds) – and it is the best work of her career so far (she won the Best Actress prize at Cannes last year, and it was a deserving win). She does an excellent job at tracking Katja’s deteriorating mental state – her decent into depression, and the brief interludes in which she may come out of it, only to be slammed back again. She is great in the film, and she keeps the whole things grounded, even as the plot threatens at times to go over-the-top or get ridiculous. This is, in some ways, a revenge story – a Death Wish for modern Germany, that also has relevance elsewhere, as the we have seen the rise of Neo-Nazi violence in many places.

 

Kruger’s performance is key in another way as well. As the white, blonde woman she is the personification of the type of person that Western audiences are easily able to identify with. But her story makes you wonder – at least a little bit, especially in the end – if our reaction would be the same if she wasn’t a blonde, white woman from Germany. Akin is a Turkish immigrant to Germany himself – and his film, at their best, has done an excellent job of showing the tension of being an outsider in Europe, and feeling like that. This time he made a film centered on a German woman herself – but it makes you wonder – and one we fully sympathize with, right up until the end of the film. But what if the story was about Nuri, doing the same thing to avenge his son and wife?