{"id":6601,"date":"2018-05-03T20:49:01","date_gmt":"2018-05-04T00:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6601"},"modified":"2018-05-03T20:49:01","modified_gmt":"2018-05-04T00:49:01","slug":"in-the-fade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/03\/in-the-fade\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Fade."},"content":{"rendered":"

The German film In the Fade<\/a><\/em> won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film this year, and made the Oscars shortlist of nine candidates before falling short of the final five. This revenge fantasy drama follows Katja (Diane Kruger) through the aftermath of a neo-Nazi terrorist attack that kills her Turkish husband and their son, including a trial of the two suspects, but ultimately is carried by Kruger even when the plot is a little predictable and the secondary characters far too hackneyed for what the film is trying to say.<\/p>\n

The story opens with a long cold open that runs us quickly through Katja\u2019s marriage to Nuri and a glimpse of their current life, with Nuri running a small business in a Turkish area of Hamburg. Katja drops their son Rocco off at Nuri\u2019s office for the afternoon so she can visit with her pregnant friend, but when she returns to pick them up, she finds a crime scene: a bomb went off in front of the office, killing Nuri and Rocco and damaging their bodies beyond recognition.<\/p>\n

We get all of this before the opening credits, in less than ten minutes, so the focus of the film truly is on Katja\u2019s reactions and how the system seems to fail her at every turn. Nuri had been jailed for drug distribution, so the officer investigating the crime immediately assumes that he had resumed those activities and blames the victim; a subsequent search of the house finds drugs Katja had used to \u2018numb the pain,\u2019 but no evidence Nuri had been dealing again. Katja\u2019s almost impossibly perfect description of one of the suspects helps lead to an arrest, but at the trial, the lawyer for the two bombers – who looks like an emaciated John Malkovich – suborns perjury and tears into Katja, saying her testimony isn\u2019t credible because she\u2019s a drug user. Despite fairly compelling evidence, the two are acquitted as the judges find reasonable doubt as to their guilt, which leads Katja feeling abandoned and seeking revenge any way she can find it.<\/p>\n

In the Fade<\/em> is gripping to watch, primarily because Kruger – who won best Actress at Cannes last year for this role – is such a dominant presence on the screen. She\u2019s forced to carry all the weight because there isn\u2019t another three-dimensional character to be found anywhere in the film: her mother is a racist train wreck, her mother-in-law blames her for her son\u2019s and grandsons\u2019 deaths, her own lawyer is kind of perfect in his own way, and so on. The script is tight, but it\u2019s about as nuanced as a sledgehammer to the forehead.<\/p>\n

And what is this film trying to say? It ends with a note about the number of terrorist incidents linked to neo-Nazis in Germany in recent years … but we knew they were bad, and it\u2019s not like In the Fade<\/em> explores the rise of these movements, or how they recruit, or what Germany might do to fight them. The two suspects are unrepentant sociopaths – although I did like that the one detail we get on them is that they enjoy jogging. It works better as a portrait of one woman\u2019s grief, and her question of whether she can go on living without her husband and son, and with no real support from her own parents. <\/p>\n

Kruger is up to the task, veering from shock to grief to rage to despair, and giving us every reason to believe her resolve when she sets out to avenge her family\u2019s deaths, with an ending that\u2019s only partly satisfying and entirely unsettling. Perhaps the idea here was to show how the system revictimizes those already hurt by terror attacks, but the script here is too lopsided to make that point effectively. I do think making the surviving victim of a terror attack aimed at immigrants a white, blonde, German woman does make the point that these killings don\u2019t just affect the \u2018other,\u2019 and that many immigrants have already assimilated somewhat or totally into western societies. <\/p>\n

If Kruger hadn\u2019t delivered such a compelling performance as Woman on the Verge, however, none of the screenwriter\u2019s points would have landed anyway. I wouldn\u2019t have given this a nomination over any of the four Oscar-nominated foreign films I\u2019ve seen from 2017, but between Kruger\u2019s performance, the tight pacing, and the strong soundtrack & score from Josh Homme (the movie takes its title from a Queens of the Stone Age song), I\u2019d still recommend it to a lot of people over a weird, scattershot art film like The Square<\/a><\/em> or a movie as grim as Loveless<\/a><\/em>, both of which are definitely not crowd-pleasers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The German film In the Fade won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film this year, and made the Oscars shortlist of nine candidates before falling short of the final five. This revenge fantasy drama follows Katja (Diane Kruger) through the aftermath of a neo-Nazi terrorist attack that kills her Turkish husband and their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[925,936,215],"class_list":["post-6601","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-movies","tag-german-films","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6601","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6601"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6601\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6602,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6601\/revisions\/6602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6601"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6601"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6601"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}