Akin brings us an important film giving focus to the impact of xenophobia rather than the much-charted rise of extremist views in western countries, in this case Germany. In the Fade has three distinct parts, first, a terrorist attack and the effect on a woman, Katja (Kruger); the second charts the woman’s pursuit of justice in a court, so far so satisfyingly procedural. In the third part the film changes pace, place and tone and the film comes into its own as a tense thriller. Katja’s husband was a Turkish immigrant. All along the police have assumed the murder is Islamist/gang-related, Katja’s convinced they’re wrong. The film has a significant question at its core: when far-right extremists use existing legal systems to protect themselves, what can victims of violence do? What does Katja do?
It took five years for the German authorities to come to grips with a series of over 50 xenophobic attacks, including nine so-called “kebab murders,” committed between 2000 and 2006. For a long time, the police erroneously suspected an inter-immigrant conflict. Born in Hamburg to Turkish immigrant parents, filmmaker Fatih Akin felt directly implicated. After a long and angry gestation period, it was when he realised the protagonist should be a woman that a story, situated in his home town, clicked into place. He cast blonde, German Diane Kruger, “because I want a broad audience to be able to identify with the story. Turks don’t need any help with that.”
Kruger, a former ballet dancer and model, peg-holed as “too beautiful to play a role of any substance” (NYT, 2006) after starring as Helen of Troy, seized the opportunity to display her talent. Hitherto happiest with his work as a documentarist, Akin says he conceived his twelfth, unabashedly personal film “in the tradition of Robert Bresson: You stick to one character, one perspective. My sympathies are with the mother, all I care about is her emotional world.”
Critics point to parallels with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, which appeared the same year. Both films transpose elements of Greek tragedy into the modern world. With very different outcomes and impacts.
“It’s as if half the film consists of close-ups of Diane Kruger’s face. One blink separates world-weary despair from merciless resolve.” Ursula März, Die Zeit
Diana Kruger scorches the screen as a victim of terrorism’. Vanessa H. Larson, The Washington Post.
