In The Fade (Fatih Akin, 2017): Germany / France

Reviewed by Bryan Austin Gillison. Viewed at the AFI Film Festival 2017.

While I will admit to being a very emotional person, it is rare to get such a visceral and overcoming reaction out of me from a film. The credits rolled and I found myself sitting there shaken to my core. My heart was racing like it might burst out of my chest and I felt such a sense of experience shared with the protagonist of this film. I believe this is due to many things, but primarily the epic and relentlessly powerful performance by Diane Kruger. She is a force to be reckoned with and the very backbone of this beautifully heartbreaking film. It’s a film we all need to watch, because it is a global issue; racism/xenophobia.

The film is broken into three parts; “Family” “Justice”, and “The Sea”. The film begins with shaky home videos of a flawed yet warm and loving un conventional family. The film does not shy away from the things that make this family resilient and special. The film makers do an excellent job of conveying the deep and unconditional love shared between them. It’s clear that the family has overcome great obstacles to arrive at this happiness and this builds investment and empathy in the audience. We feel the love intensely. Had this portion of the film not sold this concept so well, the following heartbreak may have seemed hallow. Once we move into “Justice” a familiar yet painful wound is re-opened in any individual paying attention to the world. We are not in a typical Hollywood movie, and justice will not be clean or fair. It may not even grace the screen at all. “The Sea” is not only the setting of the final act, but a wonderful metaphor for the power of family and destruction, the ability for things and individuals to be more complex than simply “good” or evil”, and washing away of old trauma and unfinished business.

Sound is used throughout this film in an very professional and nuanced manner. The deafening silence when she finds out her family has been murdered in the blast, the loudness of a baby crying later on that breed a deep jealousy in our mourning mother, and the precise and editorial sounds available in the terror of the courtroom.

This film is relentless. Relentlessly beautiful. Relentlessly heartbreaking. Relentlessly real and current. The worldview presented in this film is one of great importance. We must all look deeper into our species and our relationship with the other. We must understand how these things come about and strive to better our justice systems. This film is important because we need devices that humanize in a time of numbness.

This film had excellent production. There is a wide variety of stylistic choices but also a clear cohesion between them and every scene moves the plot forward so there is no time wasted here. I’m impressed with the boldness in style, plot, and sound. This film is a real power house of talent and story.