As this brilliant 2018 film by the director of The Lives of Others opens, it's Dresden 1937. A young Kurt Barnert (a fictionalized Gerhard Richter, modern Germany's most famous painter) is attending an exhibition on "Degenerate Art" with his devoted Aunt Elisabeth. He listens wide-eyed to a docent trash masterpieces by Kandinsky and other modernists as self-indulgent and decadent, antithetical to the spirit of the Third Reich. (Kurt and Elisabeth are clearly intrigued by the canvases.) A decade or so later Kurt, now an art student in Russian-occupied East Germany, hears the same criticisms of the modernists of the West--their art is all about "me, me, me"--only now the criticism emanates from the school's director, a faithful adherent of Socialist Realism. He singles out Picasso as an artist whose early work, with its depictions of downtrodden workers and peasants, showed promise but whose later work was ruined by subjectivity and abstraction. Whereas The Lives of Others focused on the poisonous effect of Stasi (secret police) surveillance in post-war East Germany, the historical scope of Never Look Away is broader--late 1930s into the 1960s; however, for this viewer the main takeaway of the film was that East Germany under the Communists may not have had gas chambers, but it shared many noxious features of the Nazi regime. Donnersmarck, a subtle ironist, doesn't hit us over the head with this message but allows us to draw that conclusion ourselves. The two scenes alluded to above--Nazi and Communist denunciations of modernist art in almost identical terms--is a striking example of how Donnersmarck conveys his message in visual, painterly ways.

Perhaps the most chilling of the Nazi-Communist parallels is captured in how easily Herr ("Professor") Carl Seeband, the Nazi doctor who will become Kurt's father-in-law, transitions into his role as a leading gynecologist in the German Democratic Republic. As a Nazi, he condemned countless "unfit" women to sterilization and euthanasia--including Kurt's beloved Aunt Elisabeth; as a respected physician in the GDR, he performs an abortion on his own daughter, Ellie, because he believes Kurt, the father, is like his aunt genetically tainted and he wants to prevent Kurt's union with her. Herr Seeband may no longer proudly sport his SS uniform, but his belief in eugenics is unchanged.

Kurt and Ellie do marry and then escape to the West, to Dusseldorf, where Kurt's talent is recognized and he is admitted to West Germany's cutting-edge art academy. Donnersmarck doesn't abandon irony and satire in depicting the cultural milieu of the 1960s West--American rock music, "conceptual art," glitzy gallery openings; however, the film makes it clear that it is in the West, with its appreciation and defense of individuality, that Kurt (Richter) has the freedom to develop his own unique style of painting.

In his review of the film, A.O. Scott of the New York Times highlights a comment of one of Kurt's fellow students in Dusseldorf as he surveys an early foray by Kurt into conceptual art: "It's almost an idea." Scott too-cleverly concludes that "von Donnersmarck comes tantalizingly close to an idea," that the film "bristles with half-formed thoughts and almost heady insights, and hums with an ambition that is exasperating and exhilarating in equal measure." Did we watch the same film?