In the Fade

In The Fade is Faith Akin's film out of Germany. It was nominated for the Golden Globes and was Germany's submission to the 90th Academy Awards. The story-line develops through Katja's (Diane Kruger) had met Turkish-born Kurdish Nuri Sekerci (Numan Acar) when she bought hashish from him during her student days. They got married when he was still in prison, although their parents were against the marriage. Since her son Rocco (Rafael Santana) is born, Nuri is no longer working as a drug dealer, because he studied business administration in prison and now runs a translation and tax office in Hamburg. One day Rocco and Nuri are killed by a nail bomb, which was deposited in front of the office. This has shredded everything. Because her husband was in prison for drug possession, the police investigated in the red light district. The investigators do not see that the tracks point in a completely different direction. Then they happen to be the real killers on the net. The main suspects are the neo-Nazi spouses André (Ulrich Brandhoff) and Edda Möller (Hanna Hilsdorf). But the trial is developing differently than Katja had hoped. Although her lawyer Danilo (Denis Moschitto) speaks of a watertight evidence, defender Haberbeck (Johannes Krisch) manages to settle the case in favor of the defendants. Humiliated and destroyed by the trial, Katja sees no reason to continue living. If she wants to give meaning to her life again, she has to take the law into her own hands.

Due to the nature of how the story was filmed, it became a bit of a challenge to really get any real connection to characters other than Katja. She certainly was the driving force behind the movie, and in often times was the real carrier of the plot and movie. The movie itself took on an approach to a story-line of filling in the wholes of the story. Little vignettes are given in each section to develop the backstory. The use of lighting was also a saving grace for the movie. The plot is developed into different segments, and includes home videoesque type videos to give sort of a backstory of why the segment was titled the way it was. I enjoyed the general story-line mostly due to the fact I enjoy Law and Order type shows as well as the early Hitchcock type films. This movie struggles to have a good crime movie feel to it, and doesn't have much of a driving supporting acting roles.

A basic approach, but had some solid attempts for potential growth as a director. While I appreciate the basic approach and attempt, and I am curious to see other roles Acar does and the director does. I just find it a bit disheartening to know that most of the foreign movies during award seasons that are nominated, I feel tend to be the mediocre ones. In the Fade, albeit interesting, directed by a female, and had a strong female lead, I feel like the movie only really got hype because of these two.