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Rating: Lubbenau, Spree Forest, 1945 - It’s the dead of night, lights turn on in a house surrounded by greenery. A blonde girl (Christa - Nico), standing next to her mother (Grete), looks into the distance and sees an immense red light.
Christa asks: “What is that light, mom?”, the mother replies: “It’s Berlin, darling, burning.”
Black.
Nico, 1988, the title seems to be illuminated by the colorful lights of a city.
Black.
Ibiza, 1988: The sunlight illuminates the entire landscape viewed from a house by the sea. Inside the house, Nico smokes. She turns and says to her son: “Ari, I’m going out, taking the bike.”
She grabs her bag, tosses the cigarette, and closes the door.
Black.
The opening credits, from white, are again illuminated by city lights and alternate, to the notes of These Days, with images showing glimpses of New York, during the time of Andy Warhol's Factory.
Black.
Manchester, 1986: “We are in the company of Lou Reed’s femme fatale,” says the DJ; Nico replies: “No, don’t call me that, it bothers me.” “So, will you tell us something about when you sang with the Velvet Underground?” - “No, I don’t want to…”
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Who did Nico become in 1986?
The film portrays an adult woman and an independent artist with a problematic life: especially, her heroin addiction on one hand, and her distance from Ari, the beloved son she had with Alain Delon, on the other. The past has indeed left its mark, but she is not a survivor: while others talk about her past, she looks to the present and the future.
In line with this trait of the protagonist, director Susanna Nicchiarelli chooses to narrate only the last three years of Nico's life and reserves short flashbacks for the luminous past: these are no more than distant memories in the protagonist’s mind and soul. Moreover, she rejects the typical narrative of many biopics, stuck in the rise and fall scheme of the protagonists, and instead prefers one without an upward or downward trajectory but a wavering one.
The camera follows the protagonist - played by Trine Dyrholm - from when Nico moves to Manchester. From there, it observes her as, with a small van, she travels from France to Italy, from the Czech Republic to Germany. She collects thousands of concerts, accompanied by her managers, her band, and - from 1987 - her son Ari. During the journey, the problems of Nico and those around her make up a large part of the film: the withdrawal crises of Nico and other travel companions, the uncertain and unstable feelings that inevitably arise among them, the challenges of touring in the '80s in a still-divided Europe, are observed without pity.
The camera follows the actors, the editing is slow, the dialogues are full of pauses and give time to focus on their faces: all of this contributes to giving depth to the characters and creating a close bond between them and the viewer.
The cold lighting, the soundtrack by Gatto Ciliegia against the Grande Freddo, and the scenography immerse in a context that appears twilight in symbiosis with the story of the protagonist.
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None of the survivors from her Parisian and New York years actually attended Christa’s funeral: the film omits them, thus becoming a delicate tribute to the artist and woman she became afterwards, when the spotlight for her faded.
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