They are devastating emotions and perhaps our most powerful. They have always driven the works of Fatih Akin, the Turko-German director whose films include "Head-On," "The Cut" and "The Edge of Heaven." And those feelings fuel the "In the Fade,” this seasons Golden Globe winner for Best Foreign Language film.
The film begins with a bombing, a horrific act which kills Katja's husband and child. Her anguish is overwhelming. I want to see my family, she tells the police inspector. There are no people, he tells her. Just parts.
And for awhile she, and the audience, shift their dislike to him. Why is he wasting time asking her about drugs? Why is he searching her house? Why is he so convinced that her Turkish immigrant husband was involved in the mafia, or extremism?
But then arrests are made. The people behind her loved ones' deaths come into focus. And so, too, does Katja's rage.
Akin's strength has always been that he coolly deals with hot emotions, and "In the Fade" (the title comes from a Queens of the Stone Age song) is precisely structured, divided into thirds. First comes the attack and investigation. Then comes the trial.
And then comes Katja's search for justice.
Interestingly, although the first and final parts of this story are inevitably the most dramatic, it's the middle one that is the most moving - perhaps because Akin's style is the most controlled.
His courtroom scenes are shot in deep focus, with Katja in tight closeup even as the opposing counsel - in German courts, witnesses apparently sit with their back to the lawyers - are close and clear behind her. Once, when Katja begins to lose her grip, Akin indulges in a deliberately disorienting "'Vertigo' shot" - the camera moving closer on her face as the background begins to pull away.
Yet there are other, more frantic moments here - flashes of real, honest, ugly emotion, like when Katja's in-laws fight her over the funeral arrangements, or the police inspector presses her over her husband's shady criminal past or, chasing down leads on her own, Katja blunders into an ugly nest of neo-fascists.
There isn't a false note among the actors (particularly warm is Denis Moschitto as the family lawyer, who projects a soulful, mensch-y vibe). But absolutely vibrant is Diane Kruger, an actress whose pale blonde beauty once both secured her a Hollywood presence, starting with "Troy," and almost immediately limited her to decorative parts.
Here, surrounded and supported by her own language, she gets to do more - and creates a portrait of a flawed, furious and very human woman, someone who has made every mistake possible in life. Except for falling in love with her husband, and having this adored child.
Akin has always been a straightforward and dramatic filmmaker, but the last third of the film falters a bit; suddenly the plot swerves, and Katja turns vigilante, and the film begins to feel fake. (You can already imagine a Hollywood remake, which jettisons most of the movie's first hour, and relentlessly pumps up the last 40 minutes.)
But this is still a solid, sober, moving story and one, that like so many of Akin's pictures, mines the same deep vein - our deep, and apparently inexhaustible reserves of pain and anger, loss and regret.
Bozeman Film Society presents "In the Fade" at the Rialto Theatre at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, March 4. Rated R, the film runs 106 minutes. Visit www.bozemanfilmsociety.org for previews and ticketing information - and Keep ‘Em Flickering!
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