"Never Look Away" covers a lot of ground, starting with a terrifying portrait of the Nazi's eugenics and forced sterilization program, when aunt Elisabeth-the fragile and open-faced woman we saw in the first scene-is taken to an institution after a mental breakdown following being chosen to hand "The Führer" a bouquet of flowers at a local parade. How does a country that was run by Nazis transform itself into a Communist Utopia, with the same people who shouted "Heil Hitler" now declaiming the glories of Socialism? All of this is overlaid with an awareness of the damage done by the top-down enforcement of ideology, how a society set up thus has one principle only, to destroy the individual's will and spirit. It details his romance with fashion student Ellie ( Paula Beer), and his difficulties with Ellie's parents (to say more would constitute spoilers).
Like one of those novels that follows a family through multiple generations, "Never Look Away" follows Kurt from Dresden, to Düsseldorf, to Berlin. At a daunting 188 minutes long, "Never Look Away" takes its time, doesn't force its themes. The Communists were as unforgiving as the Nazis in their attacks on artistic expression. First it was the Nazis, with their rejection of modernism, and then it's the Communists after the war, when Socialist Realism is the only style allowed in the art school attended by Kurt (played as an adult by Tom Schilling). The boy's "interaction" with art is interrupted by a world war, but-even more crucially-it's impacted by warring political ideologies. This question reverberates throughout "Never Look Away," a film spanning a 40-year period, and loosely based on the life of German painter Gerhard Richter, often referred to as the world's greatest living painter.
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