We talk condescendingly about “the folly of youth” – but what about the energy, the passion, the conviction, the ambition of youth? Köln 75 is a sparkling hymn to all of those qualities, exemplified in abundance by German teenager Vera Brandes as portrayed by Mala Emde.
Brandes’ refusal to accept impossibility or defeat gave rise to the remarkable true tale told by Ido Fluk’s film. Growing up in a stiflingly conservative family, she’s a free-spirited wild child, drawn to resistance and rebellion in politics and art. When a local DJ dismisses jazz as “museum music” – polite, stuffy, staid – Brandes insists otherwise, as someone who revels in the charged intensity and revolutionary fervour of sweaty, late-night Cologne clubs. Through force of personality, charm, chutzpah and lying about her age, she talks her way into booking a tour for Ronnie Scott and is soon regularly promoting shows.
One astonishing performance in Berlin by Keith Jarrett (played by John Magaro) convinces her to bring Miles Davis’ former pianist to Cologne’s cavernous Opera House, at great financial risk to herself. A knackered, out-of-tune piano threatens to derail Brandes’ dream, and tension over whether the notoriously exacting Jarrett will consent to play mounts as the film builds to its crescendo.
In many ways, Fluk’s protagonists Brandes and Jarrett are polar opposites: she is enthused, effervescent and idealistic, whereas he is lethargic, jaded and world weary. And yet they are connected through a mutual compulsion to wing it (Jarrett as a solo improviser, Brandes as a promoter). While Jarrett appears crushed by the fear of potential failure, Brandes is driven by it, determined to prove her uncomprehending patriarch of a father wrong.
Providing occasional fourth-wall-breaking commentary – including a splendidly succinct history of the development of jazz – is the movie’s third principal character, Michael Watts (Michael Chernus): a US journalist trying in vain to conduct an interview with Jarrett, or at least coax him into some comments that aren’t immediately declared off the record.
For a film about a now-legendary improv concert, it’s fitting that Fluk had to find creative ways around not having the rights to any of Jarrett’s music. In those circumstances, to endeavour to make the movie at all suggests Brandes-like levels of bravado and audacity on the part of the director. Where Köln 75 could perhaps be criticised is the jarring shift of tone and pace in the middle third, in which Brandes disappears offstage so that the focus can temporarily fall on Jarrett, an artist tortured by both performance anxiety and his own failing body. And yet, while this renders the snappy feelgood vibes of the trailer somewhat unrepresentative of the film as a whole, it does ultimately lend what might otherwise be a fluffy flick greater depth and weight.
This funny, sharp, smartly directed movie brings to mind Good Vibrations, Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn’s superlative film about record shop proprietor/label manager Terri Hooley in Troubles-torn 1970s Belfast. Brandes, like Hooley, is a charismatic dreamer with a vision who strives to triumph in adversity – and both films warmly celebrate the power of music to transport, connect, energise and nourish.
Dir: Ido Fluk (15, 112 mins)
words BEN WOOLHEAD
