The sound of defeat: Nico, 1988

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This review was originally posted on Letterboxd

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There is a scene in Susanna Nicchiarelli's dramatization of the final years of Christa Päffgen (better known by her stage name - Nico) when the singer is being interviewed on the radio. The DJ mentions the enormous portable cassette recorder, that she carries around with her in an oversized shoulder bag, and enquires whether she is looking for a specific sound.

Nico replies that she searching for a sound that she heard as a child, carried to her on the wind: The sound of Berlin being bombed by the allies.

“It was a sound that wasn't really a sound,” she reminisces. “It was, many things at the same time. It was... It was the sound of defeat.”

By the late 1980s, Nico was 20 years past her prime. A former model and actress. In the early 1960s, she had embarked upon a career as a singer, despite a perforated eardrum that, combined with her heavy German accent, sometimes resulted in her vocal performances straying into the realm of dissonance. It was Andy Warhol who steered her onto the debut album by The Velvet Underground, where she assumed the role of tone-deaf chanteuse.

Six solo albums followed. Her debut was lavished with songs penned by the likes of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, John Cale and Jackson Browne. There followed a trio of idiosyncratic and obtuse, largely self-penned records, overseen by Cale, that developed from a kernel of baroque Germanic folk music, laced with harmonium drone. Her fourth solo album – The End – is seasoned with the cool ambience of a freshly-opened tomb and contains what I regard as her best song: 'You Forgot To Answer' inspired by her attempt to contact The Doors' singer Jim Morrison, unaware that he had died the previous day – a model of detached despair, augmented by heavy piano chords, as she observes with blank resignation: “The high tide is taking everything.”

A final pair of records, made after she was dropped by the Island label, are seldom mentioned in retrospectives of her work. Yet it is 'My Heart is Empty' from her swansong 'Camera Obscura' that forms the backbone of Nico's redemption as an artist in this film: At a show in Czechoslovakia, the fervour of an audience under communist rule, who have been starved of western music, lifts her out of her on-stage indolence and sees her leaning into the every word of the song, as soldiers pour into the building to put an end to the performance. When she is pulled off-stage and hastily evacuated before she can be arrested, she has been rendered breathless by her efforts.

This is a rare spark in a study of an artist in the doldrums, who is largely unmoved by her own creative efforts. The film opens with Nico, played to flawed perfection by Trine Dyrholm, adrift in dumpy middle age, addicted to heroin, and absent her chiselled good looks, which are seen only in abstract flashbacks. She has squeezed herself into a narrow, low-ceilinged, two-up/two-down along a Manchurian terrace.

Asked why she has chosen Manchester as her home, she responds: “It reminds me of Berlin after the war when it was all ruins.”

'Nico, 1988' uses an ongoing tour of small venues around England and Europe as a prism through which we see the character of the film's subject laid bare. There is an overlying air of futility around these foreign sorties, packed into a small van, along with her band, her manager Richard, and Laura, who appears to fulfil the role of tour manager. An undercurrent of hostility exists between the two women: Laura despises Nico's music. Nico belittles Laura by deliberately forgetting her name.

There are aloof performances in front of scattered crowds; Nico singing with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other; on a different occasion, flinching under the bright glare of a spotlight like an escaped criminal. She blows-up on stage at her underperforming guitarist but is equally, if not more, disengaged from her art. Swigging cola unapologetically from the bottle and shovelling spaghetti into her mouth, she later announces: “I really don't care about music anymore.”

Prior to an impromptu show at an Italian hotel, she injects heroin into her leg in the kitchen, alongside a make-up box balanced on twin stacks of dinner plates. The faces of the local jazz group, who have convinced themselves that they are about to be joined by a legendary performer, can barely conceal their disappointment and distaste as their nuanced musicianship is bludgeoned by Nico's leaden rendition of 'Nature Boy'.

The weary routine of managing drug addictions while on the road looms large: “Heroin, we need heroin.” she says to the incredulous, perpetually-smiling Czech promoter, who has remained baffled by the more subtle and indirect overtures of the other band members.

The portrait of Nico that emerges is that of a strangely charismatic, but indolent, middle aged woman, who is, by turns, cantankerous, overbearingly-disagreeable, conniving and prone to temperamental outbursts which have uncertain origins. Yet she is capable of being charming when she chooses. She is a doting mother to her troubled son, Ari, who briefly joins the band on the road and who later attempts suicide.

Despite her many flaws, she seems to inspire, if not outright love, then, at the very least, a dogged loyalty from the gang of misfits that she has gathered around her. When Richard proposes to her, she bites a ketchup-drenched chip in half, like she is wrenching the head off a small animal, before informing him that she plans to give up music for a job in the flower shop owned by her landlord, who she has agreed to marry.

In another scene, she announces, with her legs spread an unladylike distance apart, that her plan is to “become a very elegant old woman. Not a fat junky.”

'Nico 1988' hints at an impending turning point in the life of its subject; a possible distancing from the music industry and her dwindling pockets of fans, in favour of a life of middle-aged domesticity. It wasn't to be: In July 1988, while resident in Ibiza, she fell from a bicycle and died later that day from a cerebral haemorrhage. She was 49.

Nicchiarelli's likeable film doesn't push an agenda and it certainly doesn't flatter its subject. What emerges is a portrait of a complicated woman, disengaged from her own creativity, and at a crossroads in her life. In the same way that Nico's music has become something that is discovered by happenstance, this drama is likely to enjoy a similar, below the radar, longevity as one of the unsung gems in the genre of music biography.

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