Critic Reviews

A movie that’s a little too eager to be liked. But it’s also tough to resist.

Köln 75 is an enjoyably off-beat blend of biopic, historical pageant and music-geek lecture from US writer-director Ido Fluk.

You don’t need to be a Keith Jarrett fan to enjoy Köln 75, but for anyone who is the movie is a savory anecdote that colors in his fluky rapture.

As a punchy portrait of a young woman railing against a dreary future, Köln 75 is diverting and entertaining. As a portrait of a singular artist who pushed at the boundaries of his form, it’s somewhat less accomplished. In blending the two it ends up caught in a middle ground that seems unsure who the film is really for.

Even the most formulaic scenes in the film bop with the zest of history being lived first-hand, as if the script were happily oblivious to its own clichés, and while the filmmaking itself falls well short of creating the chaos that it aspires to celebrate, Fluk at least taps into the fun of telling us about it.

Scrappy, stylish and occasionally self-indulgent, Köln 75 turns backstage bedlam into jazz-infused drama. Mala Emde conducts the chaos and her performance, like the film, is most alive when everything threatens to collapse.

Here is a niche drama about one of the most important chapters in the history of experimental jazz. It is however watchable, well acted and avoids the music-movie cliches – though I could have done without the fourth-wall-breaking lectures about the nature of jazz improvisation.

Unfortunately, for a film mainly about an assertive young woman making her way in a culture ruled by men, Köln 75 becomes far more compelling after Jarrett finally makes his entrance.

Fluk doesn’t have a firm enough handle on the material to make that story interesting. And the uneven division of the Keith and Vera plotlines makes Köln 75 a movie without a narrative center.