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.