Writers: Eline Gehring, Francy Fabritz and Sara Fazilat
Director: Eline Gehring
Nico, written by Eline Gehring, Francy Fabritz and Sara Fazilat and showing at BFI Flare, is a smart female-centred story about the aftermath of trauma and its effects on Nico’s self-esteem and close relationships. Following a xenophobic attack due to her Iranian heritage, geriatric nurse Nico struggles to adjust, starting to withdraw from the clients who need her and best friend Rosa who cannot understand the change. Taking up karate to learn self-defence, Nico’s confidence starts to rise.
Gehring, Fabritz and Fazilat’s film is a carefully managed, slow-burn character study that initially establishes the relatively carefree routines of Nico’s life – the dedicated gentleness with those who need her help, particularly the entertaining Birgitte, her deep and easy friendship with Rose and the urban environment that Nico feels at home in. Captured in an almost documentary style, Nico is presented as an ordinary woman making do.
So, when the attack comes with no warning, filmed in blurs and cutaways, the unexpected violence of it proves as shocking to the viewer as it does to Nico. And while there has been a spirit of rebellion in her, it crumbles when attacked. There is a hinted, but underdeveloped, love story as Nico gets close to a fairground worked but Gehring, Fabrtiz and Fazilat’s film excels in its portrayal of the effects and aftermath of trauma.
How lead actor Sara Fazilat captures the interior shifts and calibrations is particularly fine, affecting her behaviour as Nico pulls into herself and Director Gehring gives a sense of a person trapped on the inside looking out. She is never unprofessional with her clients, but her brittle exterior layer cannot conceal the unhappiness and frustration she feels that seems oppressive and consuming.
Even in the karate scenes, Gehring offers no easy solutions as lesser storytellers may do, no empowering montage or sudden improvement in her state of being. Instead, with her red-faced karate leader Andy (Andreas Marquardt) pushing her, Nico learns self-control and composure as well as physical fitness and defence techniques, all set back by flows of emotion that threaten to derail her progress while showing there is no straight line through trauma.
The intensity and value of that approach means the film lacks focus elsewhere neither making its central low-key romance convincing nor making sense of an eleventh-hour revelation. The nuance of Nico’s friendship with Rosa (Javeh Asefdjah) also lacks scrutiny so the film just ends without fully exploring either. But Nico is an enjoyable and successful exploration of social violence and its multiple effects on a young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Nico is screening at BFI Flare 2022.
