In the Fade

Is it pos­si­ble to sep­a­rate a good per­for­mance from a bad movie? Can you sur­gi­cal­ly slice around it and toss away the excess? Or maybe engage in a form of selec­tive myopia, where you just focus on the ele­ments that you want to see, and ignore the unsight­ly stuff around it? In the Fade, the lat­est from the pro­lif­ic (but errat­ic) Ger­man direc­tor Fatih Akin, is quite awful as a movie, as a polit­i­cal state­ment, and as a nuanced piece of storytelling.

How­ev­er, it does have one ace up its sleeve, and that is Diane Kruger, who not only decides to invest her cen­tral char­ac­ter with a lev­el of sen­si­tiv­i­ty that’s unde­serv­ing of this schlock mate­r­i­al, but decides to run with a sto­ry­line which is, by turns, idi­ot­ic, offen­sive and, by the end, com­plete­ly farcical.

And far­ci­cal is not what you want when the inten­tion is a stern state-of-Europe address on racial­ly-moti­vat­ed vio­lence and an explo­ration into the unwieldy bag­gage of for­giv­ing those who have sinned against us. Kruger plays Kat­ja, an ex-drug addict mar­ried to a one-time deal­er who has served time for his crimes. Now they have a pre­co­cious young scamp in design­er specs and a legit­i­mate busi­ness, one that nobly serves the local immi­grant com­mu­ni­ty of Hamburg.

This ram­shackle idyll comes tum­bling down when a young woman on a push­bike drops a fer­tilis­er bomb out­side their shop front just as Kat­ja is on her way out. The highs of famil­ial har­mo­ny sud­den­ly meet the lows of grief and des­o­la­tion. Rea­sons to stick around on this mor­tal coil become more sparse by the minute.

And then, at the very precipice of her pain, Kat­ja is dragged back to san­i­ty as the cul­prits are caught – now, at least, she can live to see them pun­ished by the state for their atro­cious crimes. The film’s mid-sec­tion bun­dles us into a stuffy court­room where a pair of pasty neo-Nazis are in the dock, and it takes on the con­ven­tion­al tone of a teatime TV drama.

Akin’s slip­shod writ­ing sign­posts where every­thing is head­ing, though dur­ing these scenes the film pos­i­tive­ly haem­or­rhages the small mea­sure of cred­i­bil­i­ty it had man­aged to accrue. In the knowl­edge that the film still has about 45 min­utes left on the clock, it’s fair­ly obvi­ous what hap­pens next, and Akin duly oblig­es with a shock twist so laboured, you won­der why the cast and crew didn’t just down tools and dash for the exits.

The Eng­lish title, In the Fade, infers that Kat­ja might be oper­at­ing in some kind of moral grey area when she makes her sub­se­quent life choic­es. Yet the real­i­ty is, this is lit­tle more than a female-front­ed rehash of Death Wish dressed up in vague­ly arty duds. It appears as if Akin’s inten­tion may have been to pose a provoca­tive conun­drum about how best to deal with the real­i­ties of mur­der­ous xeno­pho­bia, but his deci­sion to paint Kat­ja as a moral­ly taint­ed albeit right­eous aveng­ing angel lends it the feel of a ret­ro­grade polemic and an insid­i­ous endorse­ment of quid pro quo vio­lence over com­pas­sion. Leaves an almost med­i­c­i­nal­ly bit­ter taste in the mouth, this one.