In the Fade

All happy families are alike; but happy mixed families make some people unhappy. 

In Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s remarkable film about a hate crime and its aftermath, a survivor responds to a practically impersonal crime in way which demonstrates how deeply personal all crime can be.

Most notable is Diane Kruger’s lead role, played with an understated intensity that is breath-taking. The story is unusual for a movie because although there are obvious bad guys, there is no pat resolution or bright-line ideological "takeaway" for anyone. A certain “self-affirmation” and “empowerment” may occur, but the protagonist does not glow as a feel-good beacon and no “ass” is “kicked” Hollywood-style in the making of this film.

The narrative unwinds matter-of-factly as though a lawyer were telling it, in three acts: “The Family”, “Justice”, and “The Sea”. Flashbacks of the family’s happy past come from clips on a smartphone; the protagonist’s shaky present—the law views this tattooed, unconventional woman and her former family life skeptically; her mother and in-laws treat her like a wayward daughter—is shot by handheld camera; and the court scenes look like what we are used to seeing in on the screen. This review contains no spoilers.

The story opens with Nuri Şekerci (Numan Acar), a prison inmate, marrying Katja (Kruger) in a ceremony in prison to The Temptations’ “My Girl”. Nuri is a German-born Turkish Kurd doing a four year stretch for dealing hashish; Katja at first was one of his customers. Nuri spent his time inside getting an education. When he got out, he settled down with Katja, opened a storefront business as a tax consultant and interpreter, and the couple had a son, Rocco (Rafael Santana). 

A daytime bomb blast at Nuri’s shop kills him and six-year-old Rocco. The shop is in a quiet Turkish quarter of Hamburg where there had been no problems with white supremacists. Chief Inspector Gerrit (Henning Peker) who leads the investigation starts from the assumption that if Nuri was the target, it is most likely that he was involved in criminal activities which fell afoul of Islamists or an ethnic crime group. But Danilo Fava (Denis Moschitto), Nuri’s former attorney, assures Katja that Nuri was clean.

Most of the action between the bombing and the trial take place in the rain. It is Katja’s chance encounter with a young German woman in front of the business prior to the blast which eventually leads the police to the neo-Nazis suspects.     

The second act is a tense courtroom drama. Under German criminal procedure, the state prosecutes defendants but an inquisitorial presiding judge does most of the direct questioning and pronounces the sentence. In serious felony matters like this the court is a panel of three professional and two lay judges. The defendants each have counsel and, unlike in US courts, German courts give equal weight to victims’ survivors who may appear with counsel and participate as co-plaintiffs.

Edda Möller (Hanna Hilsdorf), the woman Katja believed she saw in front of Nuri’s office before the blast, and her husband André Möller (Ulrich Friedrich Brandhoff), are the defendants in what gives every appearance of a slam-dunk prosecution. There is no doubt that they are neo-Nazis supported by a rogues’ gallery of beefy, humorless thugs. However, the outcome becomes less certain because Edda is ably defended by a defense attorney named Haberbeck (Johannes Krisch). The trial becomes a “play within a play” of the main story.

Our synopsis stops here because the outcome of the trial and the third act make for gripping drama. The actual ending is satisfying because it is the best of as many as five possible endings that this story considers and explores, beginning in act one. The film also is notable for having no sex scenes and female nudity: it is a woman’s story about her struggle to see justice done.

The narrative reminded MP of the contemporary writings of German defense lawyer Ferdinand von Schirach whose plain, direct stories of his unusual cases are naturally cinematic. These stories have been serialized in two German television series (Shades of Guilt [Schuld, starring Moritz Bleibtreu] and Crime Stories [Verbrechen]) and several films, most recently Der Fall Collini [The Collini Case] (2019) about a retired Italian autoworker who murdered a German industrialist.

Aus dem Nichts (In the Fade) 2017 Germany (106 minutes) directed by Fatih Akin, screenplay by Fatih Akin and Hark Bohm; director of photography, Rainer Klausmann; edited by Andrew Bird; casting by Monique Akin; music by Joshua Homme.

Strangers When We Meet

Strangers When We Meet is a love story with elements of Casablanca, if one can imagine the noble American romantic as a thinking ex-GI of the new middle class in midcentury suburban Los Angeles.

Larry Coe (Kirk Douglas) is an independent-minded architect who broke away from a conventional career path. His dilemma is whether to break away from a conventional marriage. This write-up includes no plot spoilers.

Sixty years on, this film gives a natural portrayal of how the world looked to the rising middle class in the postwar period. The consumer middle class was a new thing. It was the backbone of the so-called Greatest Generation, a product of the Depression, the war, and the postwar economic boom. Nearly everyone we see except for maids and nannies is "white" and from a variety of elsewheres. Many in the new socioeconomic mainstream did not lead the lives their parents lived; they felt that their new status put them within reach of an elite which at the time was white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. People formerly excluded, now college-educated by the G.I. Bill and prosperous, could fit in and advance. Their success made this pattern a model.

But to fit into what? The elephant in the room was artificial social conventions that made for a one-size-fits-all, vanilla standard that suited no one. In this story we see middle-class people enjoy society’s relishes and privileges in the context of conformity to this standard which looks more like mutually-assured misery. It may explain why the Greatest Generation drank so much; it leaves little doubt that the artificial standard fostered the rainbow of social liberation movements just over the horizon.

The film's title is referenced in a comment by Coe’s principal client near the end: “We meet as strangers and then half the time we part that way. Yeah, and if we ever really get to know another human being, it’s a miracle.” That said, it is interesting to watch how people without smartphones are better listeners and attuned to reading each other’s body language and gestures.

Coe is a “wonder boy” architect who quit the firm rat race with an ambitious vision for his life and his work. Roger Altar (Ernie Kovacs), a writer flush with the success of a novel, sees one of Coe’s houses in a magazine and wants to hire Coe to build this house on an undeveloped hill in Bel Air. Coe convinces Altar he can do better than that; Altar gives him a big budget to do it. Douglas and Kovacs have great chemistry. Their characters are fun to watch and their back-and-forth about their work is authentic and helpful to each. Altar’s offhand social attitudes may put off viewers in 2020 but they were unremarkable at the time.

Coe met his wife Eve (Barbara Rush) on furlough during the war. The actors’ good chemistry here shows that Larry and Eve have a loving relationship in a comfortable home with two sons. Eve is a supportive housewife ambitious for her husband’s career as an elevator to status. Larry knows that she is disappointed that he left the firm, and that she also knows when the firm keeps after him to take prestigious, high-paying commissions, that he would prefer to do his own work, like the Altar house

Margaret Gault (Kim Novak) is one of the Coes’ Brentwood neighbors. Since Coe began to work from home he drives his school-age son to the bus stop. This is where he first sees Mrs. Gault, stunning in a plain Republican cloth coat as she brings her own son to the bus stop. Coe gets used to seeing Mrs. Gault at the bus stop. He crosses paths with her several times but makes no headway with small talk. At last one morning he gets her to ride with him to the Altar building site. They spend the morning taking measurements, at the end of which Coe tells Mrs. Gault he can see his building; perhaps in the same spirit, calling this beautiful but reserved Margaret “Maggie” is his parti for their affair.

A detail that lends authenticity to the story and Coe’s character is that the Altar building site is where we watch a house become part of the hill as this story develops. The house construction keeps pace with the affair. This was Ernie Kovacs’s home at 930 Chantilly Road in Bel Air, a beautifully refined structure with an almost Japanese sensibility that a later remodel rendered into a heavy post-modern Western pile.

See this movie on a large screen. It is shot in color in CinemaScope and many scenes unfold in long takes within the frame, seamed together with clean contrast cuts, such as from a housewife in one kitchen to a neighbor in a similar kitchen.

Margaret’s mother Mrs. Wagner (Virginia Bruce) adds a generational context and a plot point. An affair apparently ended her marriage with Margaret’s father and since strained her relationship with her daughter. Mrs. Wagner sees herself in her daughter: Margaret married Ken Gault (John Bryant), “the first nice boy that came along” and may repeat her history. Mrs. Wagner knows her daughter is not in love with Ken. He displays a fraternal fondness for his wife; he bristles awkwardly in private as she smolders for his attention.

The odd man out is the cynical, ironic moralist Felix Anders (Walter Matthau), a self-described “observer of the human scene”.

In the end, a plane leaves Casablanca with people on it headed for a new life. Prior to that, Larry, a romantic like Rick Blaine, must decide whether the “problems of three little people” amount to more than “a hill of beans” in life’s larger contexts. 

Strangers When We Meet 1960 US; Columbia Pictures (117 minutes) directed by Richard Quine; screenplay by Evan Hunter based on Hunter’s novel of the same title; cinematography by Charles Lang; editing by Charles Nelson; music by George Duning.