Unlike Volker Schlondorf's THE TIN DRUM (Germany 1979), which takes an unmitigating and visceral look at Germany's plunge into WW2, and how it stunted the country's growth, NEVER LOOK AWAY takes a far dreamier look at the same problem and, for good measure, the central character hails from Dresden, in the former GDR, so he also suffers the vicissitudes of the Cold War.
The evil of Nazi Germany is represented by a doctor who had sterilized and even gased people deemed unnecessary by the regime, and this doctor is so evil that he even kills Aryans like the central character's beautiful young aunt, who likes to flaunt her nudity in the presence of her six year old nephew. Incestuous and pedophile-like as that might seem, Director von Donnersmarck seems to think that beateous naked female beauty can just lay those negative impressions to rest.
Just as Gunther Grass had linked Germany's growth stagnation to the Nazi regime and WW2, so this film - scripted by Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - sees the central character and his wife unable to have a child because the above mentioned doctor, the wife's father, actually forced her to have an abortion and fiddled with her uterus and other parturition parts to prevent her having children with a man he deemed inferior. That is not all: that evil doctor had already sent the aunt to the gas chamber... and she was not even Jewish, she was German. Capital and unforgivable sin.
There is a truly pathetic sequence in which that ill-fated aunt asks bus drivers to toot their horns simultaneously, which gives her something akin to a spiritual orgasm, and of course toward the end the nephew seizes a similar opportunity. In between, the movie rambles on for an excrutiatingly pointless 188 minutes.
That is not all. The central character comes up with a most innovative improvement on unpainted canvases: he makes paintings out of photographs, and somehow those "masterpieces" bring together doctor, aunt, central character, and the Nazi regime's human elimination mastermind.
Overlong, pretentious and an insult to any average IQ. Best avoided.
The evil of Nazi Germany is represented by a doctor who had sterilized and even gased people deemed unnecessary by the regime, and this doctor is so evil that he even kills Aryans like the central character's beautiful young aunt, who likes to flaunt her nudity in the presence of her six year old nephew. Incestuous and pedophile-like as that might seem, Director von Donnersmarck seems to think that beateous naked female beauty can just lay those negative impressions to rest.
Just as Gunther Grass had linked Germany's growth stagnation to the Nazi regime and WW2, so this film - scripted by Director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck - sees the central character and his wife unable to have a child because the above mentioned doctor, the wife's father, actually forced her to have an abortion and fiddled with her uterus and other parturition parts to prevent her having children with a man he deemed inferior. That is not all: that evil doctor had already sent the aunt to the gas chamber... and she was not even Jewish, she was German. Capital and unforgivable sin.
There is a truly pathetic sequence in which that ill-fated aunt asks bus drivers to toot their horns simultaneously, which gives her something akin to a spiritual orgasm, and of course toward the end the nephew seizes a similar opportunity. In between, the movie rambles on for an excrutiatingly pointless 188 minutes.
That is not all. The central character comes up with a most innovative improvement on unpainted canvases: he makes paintings out of photographs, and somehow those "masterpieces" bring together doctor, aunt, central character, and the Nazi regime's human elimination mastermind.
Overlong, pretentious and an insult to any average IQ. Best avoided.