Nico, 1988

source: Nico, 1988

A strong biographical drama portraying the last years of singer Nico, former Velvet Underground. It develops well her uneasy character, her personal relations, her artistic view. The movie is good in all technical traits. However, what is impossible not to highlight is the outstanting performance by Tirine Dyrholm. He is simply amazing in the leading role, showing all the anger, sadness, impatience, impulsiveness, sometimes vatious of these feelings at once! As I read in two otber review, if the world were better (or if Acadeny Awards were serious), she would have certainly won the Oscar as the best actress.

Writer/Director Susanna Nicchiarelli's flint-edged, wickedly acerbic biographical drama takes the viewer on a refreshingly raw and unsentimental tour of the final fitful years of the incomparable artist formerly known as Nico aka Christa Päffgen. Starting in a deceptively prosaic manner with earnest, starstruck manager Richard (John Gordon Sinclair) showing the prospective tenant Christa (Trine Dyrholm) around a rundown property in Manchester, feigning the need to pee, Christa injects heroin, and, thus, we are unflinchingly drawn into the tragic, blackly funny, spirited, paranoid, sporadically beautiful final years of this incomparable artiste! Music biogs are all too often trite, overly burnished homilies, but 'Nico' 1988' excitingly captures the beguiling enigma of its inimitable musical heroine. Trine Dyrholm's Christa is a fearless force of nature, whether onstage mesmerically invoking Nico's music with an exhilarating verisimilitude, immobilized by heroin, or kvetching acidly with equally strung-out band members, Trine Dyrholm's dynamite performance is vividly charged with a deliciously dark magnetism! Such a palpably doomy, downward-spiralling film centred upon the more diminished capacities of such a unique artist could be depressingly maudlin, yet 'Nico, 1988', while undeniably heartbreaking, is also vivid, uproarious, elegiac, celebratory, and it rocks exceedingly hard indeed! This is exemplary film-making, the decadent, insalubrious 80s are immaculately realised, a deliciously unglamorous milieu of rickety, claustrophobically snug transit vans, anonymous, ill-lit venues, cramped, makeshift accommodations, dismal, drug-laced inertia all leavened by brief cathartic ecstasy of the stage are all thrillingly rendered in Susanna Nicchiarelli's adrenalized musical masterpiece! Along with Trine Dyrholm's formidable presence, I was also taken by the beguilingly gentle performance by Anamaria Marinca as the kindly, ingenuous Romania Violinist Sylvia. Wholly deserving its accolades 'Nico, 1988' is a searing, soul stirring, sonically satisfying biopic of a fascinatingly elusive, fathoms deep, wholly irreplaceable musical iconoclast.

Nico,1988: Biopic about Nico's final years, She didn't like being reminded of The Velvet Underground, preferred to play her own music. Some sad scenes, bad gigs in third rate venues, fifth rate accommodation but also upbeat, especially a concert in Prague in 1986. She also tried to reconnect with her son, then in his mid-20s. Nico doesn't endear herself to Mancunians when she says that Manchester reminds her of Berlin after the war. Some short flashbacks inform the narrative, her son Ari as a child, herself as a young girl watching Berlin burn. Trine Dyrholm movingly portrays Nico, warts and all, especially her struggles with addiction. Written and Directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli. 8/10.

Andy Warhol said that everyone has their fifteen minutes of fame. And he gave Nico, a beautiful young model, her fifteen minutes by pairing her with the Velvet Underground, a rock band in his orbit who were starting their careers. If I recall correctly, the Velvets were unconvinced by their guest singer, but the one album they made together became a cult success. But what do you do when your moment of fame passes? Nico died in relative obscurity before the age of 50, grappling with heroin addiction. As a concept, 'Nico, 1988' might be imagined to be simply unbearably sad. But in fact, there's a lot to enjoy in Susanna Nicchiarelli's film. Her Nico is an addict, sure, with all that that entails, but also a not unaccomplished jazz-rock singer, and a real person trying to extract meaning from her life. It's not easy for her, but neither is this a story of a life not worth living; and her death a sudden and mostly unexpected tragedy the same as anyone else's. Trine Dyrholm is very good in the lead role bringing the character to three-dimensional life. It's an unsentimental movie, but in no senses a cold one.

"Nico, 1988" (2017 Italian-Belgian co-production; 93 min.) is a bio-pick that examines the last 2 years of Nico, the German singer/performer who because instantly famous in the mid/late 60s for her association with Andy Warhol and of course her collaboration with The Velvet Underground. As the movie opens, we are told it is "1986" and we get to know Nico, who is moving into a small and unremarkable house in gray and gloomy Manchester, England. She is about to tour with her new band, made up mostly of second or third rate musicians, but her manager can't afford better. Along the way we see Nico struggling with her heroin addiction. At this point we are 10 min. into the movie, but to tell you more of the plot would spoil your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out. Couple of comments: this movie is directed by directed by Susanna Nicchiarelli, whom I admit I am not familiar with. In fact, much of this Italian-Belgian co-production features a cast of unknowns, except for Danish actress Trine Dyrholm in the title role (we saw her most recently in the excellent "The Commune"). Dryholme is absolutely sensational as the latter day Nico, and she carries the movie on her shoulders (she is in virtually every frame of the movie). On top of that, Dryholm also does her own singing of the various songs from Nico's solo albums that we hear and watch throughout the movie). Is everything that we watch in this film truly an accurate reflection of how those last two years of Nico's life? I haven't a clue, but one does get the sense that there is a good overall narrative in this film, for whatever that's worth. I likely would've missed this film but for the fact that during a recent family visit to Belgium, I heard about this and then read an interview with Trine Dyrholm in a Belgian magazine. The movie opened the very weekend I was there. The Friday early evening screening where I saw this at in Antwerp, Belgium, was attended okay but not great. That's hardly a surprise as this isn't the type of movie that will find a large mainstream audience. But if you are interested in learning more about Nico's latter years in life, you could do a lot worse than watching this movie, and hence I'd readily recommended you do (I have my doubts this will get a theatrical release in the US so check it out on VOD or eventually on DVD/Blu-ray).

Bookended by a radio interview in which Nico likens eighties Manchester to postwar Berlin. Dwelling upon her final years as a self-confessed "fat old junkie" with only fleeting flashbacks to her days as Andy Warhol's muse (her participation in 'La Dolce Vita' isn't even mentioned), the portrait that emerges is more like that of a punk rocker than of a hippy. With a cigarette permenantly hanging from her lips Trine Dyrholm's throaty rendition of her songs give them a resonance similar to the latter day Marianne Faithfull. (To my untutored ear the way she croaks her way through 'Nature Boy' supplies a poignancy similar to Claire Trevor singing 'Moanin' Low' in 'Key Largo'.)

He had more potential, especially dramatic and family, he had a child with Alan Dellon, who was never recognized by him, despite his parents having raised and adopted him, at age 16 Nico's son shared drugs and syringes with her, he was born during the war, the German soldier father, will die in the war, she had stated that maybe all Germans have Nazism in their veins, when asked about, there was a lot about her to be said, they focused on a short time, unfortunately, uninteresting...

No music and scenes from Lou Reed and Velvet Underground years, the movie is entirely dedicated to the last years of Nico's life, and in particular to her last and sad tour in Europe. Susanna Nicchiarelli portrays the former model and Andy Warhol's muse in her painful and problematic adult phase, which sees her tired and dissatisfied, desperate to break free from her drug and success past, when she was beautiful but not happy. A crude and bleak portrait, which Dyrholm renders fully convincing.

I rated this 8/10. Maybe I should have rated it higher. There are parts of this film that I am not sure if they are flawed or genius. A bit like Nico's ouevre, so that is perhaps appropriate. I was utterly transfixed for the duration of the movie. And yet by what I do not know. Relatively little happens. There are long silences. Yet both what is said and not said manages to restlessly slip away from cliche, and at the end I felt like I understood something I did not understand before. I am not sure who I could recommend this film to, yet I feel like I experienced something masterful