The following study is meant for those who have already watched the movie In the Fade. It contains spoilers.
The original title of In the Fade is Aus dem Nichts, or From Nothing. While the American title doesn't mean much, the German title offers a hint about how we should view this slow burner. What are we to gather from the "nothing" offered to us?
If we are to take this film at face value and believe what the film tells us, then there are no surprises. Katja Sekerci's husband and son get killed in a terrorist bombing in a Turkish neighborhood of Germany. Nazis are blamed for it and there's a trial. The Nazis get acquitted. Katja is out for revenge. All of that is revealed in the trailer and that's pretty much the surface of the story. However, there's a much deeper story being told here. It's what's not being told that fills in the blanks, so to learn the deeper story the information literally has to be pulled out of nothing.
Let's start at the beginning. Nuri Sekerci is in prison. Everyone is cheering for him and hugging him as he walks the hall. At one point he throws both hands up and flashes what appear to be gang signs. Everyone cheers. We find out he's walking the hall in order to go to a room to be married to Katja, a woman covered in tattoos. So right off the bat, we know these two aren't angels. He's a convict. She's a woman who is marrying a convict, a man she met because he was her drug dealer in college.
Flash forward. Now Katja is older. She's with her son Rocco. On their way to Nuri's office they nearly get hit by a car. She spouts profanities at the driver but surprisingly her little son Rocco spouts a more vulgar string of vulgarities. She laughs it off. Calls him a little "gangster." She drops her son off at her husband's office and something symbolic happens. She tells her little son not to look at the computer screen too much and his response is that he already wears glasses. Before she leaves, Nuri reminds her that she's forgetting her own pair of glasses. This suggests that Nuri and Rocco are seeing things clearly while Katja is oblivious.
While her husband is at his office working, she goes off with her pregnant friend for a relaxing day at the spa. That's her life I suppose. She slacks off as her husband works. On her return to her husband's office, that's when she learns that a bomb has gone off and both her husband and her son are dead.
From this point forward we are led to believe that Nuri had given up the drug business after the birth of his son and that the bombing was a random incident orchestrated by some Nazis who hated Turks and who didn't necessarily target Nuri or Rocco. But is getting out of drug dealing that easy? There are only two sources telling us that Nuri had gone straight and neither of them is reliable. The first is Katja, and she isn't completely convinced since she goes to her lawyer-friend Danilo to reassure her about it. Our second source is Danilo, who isn't a reliable source at all because he supplies Katja with a bag of drugs that he claims were given to him by some clients. It's one thing to defend drug dealers but another to accept drugs from them and then also distribute those drugs. Danilo is in the drug dealing business so how can we trust his word that Nuri wasn't?
During this meeting with Danilo, Katja suggests that the Nazis were behind the bombing. This suggestion comes quite out of the blue and Danilo doesn't seem very surprised by it. It's as if, without actually spelling it out for us, they are talking about a certain group of Nazis that they are familiar with, not just Nazis in general. There seems to be an unspoken suggestion that Nuri had some dealings with some specific Nazis. Perhaps he was supplying some Nazis with drugs and perhaps he did indeed go clean, cutting the Nazis off from their supply. This might inspire the Nazis to take action against him. Or perhaps Nuri was still in the drug trade and he was competing with the Nazis for the market. In any case, when the drugs her own lawyer supplied her cause Katja to end up in an interrogation room, and Katja suggests the Nazis killed her husband, the detective asks some logical questions, like were there any previous racist incidents in the neighborhood leading up to this. The answer is no, suggesting once again Nuri was the target and not just a random victim of a terrorist attack.
Katja is suicidal. We suddenly find her in the bathtub bleeding out, having cut both her wrists. The phone rings and it's the detective leaving a message on the machine saying she was right, Nazis were involved and the suspects have been arrested. With that glimmer of hope she puts her suicide attempt on hold for the time being. The only thing keeping her alive at this point is the anticipation of seeing the husband and wife Nazi team get justice. But they don't. They get acquitted.
Katja is a drug addict. She's also mentally unstable. These accusations were made by the sleazy defense lawyer, but if you think about it, it's true. First thing she does after the tragedy is score some cocaine and opium from her lawyer, and she smokes the opium out of a folded piece of aluminum as if she's done it a thousand times before. If her own lawyer hadn't supplied her with drugs, which she got busted for, the defense wouldn't have been able to use that against her when scrutinizing her credibility in court. She also physically attacks the defendant in court, suggesting again that she's mentally unstable. She personally sabotaged any hope of a guilty verdict by her own actions.
By this point there is something else that is perhaps keeping Katja alive, giving her a glimmer of hope. She hasn't had her period in months. Perhaps she's pregnant.
Katja plans her revenge on the Nazis. She builds a pressure cooker bomb similar to the one that was used on her family. This isn't so far-fetched. She has access to the trial evidence and during the trial the instructions on how to build such a bomb were clearly illustrated. Also, she was married to a drug dealing Turkish gangster. It's not all that hard to imagine that she might have had some experiences around bomb making. She locates the Nazis living in a camper on a beach in Greece and puts the bomb behind the camper wheel with the intention of blowing it up by remote control when the Nazis come back from their morning jog. But she gets cold feet and takes the bomb away. Could be she was still considering the possibility that she was pregnant, and she would certainly be arrested for murder, giving her unborn child no chance in life. Another reason might be the way the original bombing was described during the court proceedings: as cowardly.
But then she gets her period. She's not pregnant. She goes about her revenge once again, this time not in a cowardly way, not hiding in a bush at a safe distance with the detonator. This time she straps the bomb to her chest and walks right into the camper on the beach and blows it, herself and the Nazis to hell. She has become a suicide bomber.
Once when talking with her lawyer as they both were chugging shots of alcohol like it was going out of style, she posed a hypothetical: what if she and Rocco had been killed instead. Nuri would have taken matters into his own hands and wouldn't be sitting around putting up with the "chit chat." So in the end she did what Nuri would have done. If this line of reasoning is accurate, it would suggest Nuri was more than just a gangster and drug dealer, that perhaps he had ties to terrorists and perhaps there was a lot more going on "in the fade" or "out of nothing" than what was being supplied to us on the surface of this tale.
There was some kind of written statistic that flashed by so fast at the very end that I barely could read a third of it. It had something to do with how many attacks there are against immigrants, or something like that. I wonder if this bit of information was tacked on for an American audience since this film really isn't about immigrants being attacked. This film is a mystery, a character study about a drug addicted, suicidal, self-destructing woman whose drug dealing, gangster husband is murdered by some Nazis for a reason perhaps only she knew of but never revealed to us.
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