Director: Ido Fluk

Stars: Mala Emde, John Magaro, Michael Chernus, Enno Trebbs, Shirrin Lilly Eissa, Leo Meier, Daniel Betts

Released in Germany to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the release of Keith Jarrett’s ‘The Koln Concert’, the best-selling solo album in jazz history, Ido Fluk’s film has a fascinating and rousing true story to tell, but the execution is puzzling. Emde is Vera Brandes, the teenage daughter of a dentist who decides to become a concert promoter on the advice of a visiting Ronnie Scott (Betts) who she catches at a small Berlin venue. After a patchy start she gets the hang of it, and when she sees jazz pianist Jarrett (a hip, moody John Magaro) play, she embarks on her most ambitious project: to stage a concert for Jarrett at the Cologne Opera House. To help her, she ropes in her older hippie boyfriend Jan (Trebbs), best friend Isa (Eissa), and her sadsack live-at-home brother Fritz (Meier). Inevitably Vera encounters a series of hitches and barriers, all the while trying to keep the unpredictable, uncompromising Jarrett on side.

Adopting a suitably jazzy improv style, Fluk deploys jaunty editing, digressions, and to-the-camera addresses, which are entertaining and wearisome in equal measure. Midway the film’s fidgety tone is interrupted with a more languid sequence in which music journalist Michael Watts (Chemus), hitching a ride to Cologne with Jarrett, attempts to elicit enough words from the musician to cobble together an article.

Edme gives it her all as the film’s irrepressible heroine, even if her Girl Powered character is underwritten, and there’s a vague nod to the radical politics of the time via Vera’s beret-wearing friend Isa. In a frustrating move, Jarrett’s music is passed over in favour of contemporary pop and Kosmische Musik. The propulsive drive of the latter at least matches the picture’s (too) breathless rhythm. A present-day epilogue involving Vera’s disproving father reaches for feelgood defiance but feels curiously sour.

David Willoughby

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