KÖLN 75
By capturing the skronky zeitgeist, Fluk enriches our experience of the performance more vividly than a conventional biopic
Directed by: Ido Fluk
Starring: Mala Emde, John Magaro, Alexander Scheer
Certificate: 15
Released: 5 June 2026
Rating: 8/10
“This is not a film about the Cologne concert,” announces the voiceover at the start of Ido Fluk’s freewheeling improvisation around Keith Jarrett. Comparing the legend of his legendary 1975 performance to the Sistine Chapel, he insists the film we’re about to see is “not about the mural, or the ceiling, or Michelangelo. It’s about the scaffolding”.
This may seem an inauspicious opening to a movie that hopes to take you deep into the madness, risk, dream and grace of a great performance. But the sly magic of this modestly maverick film is that by capturing the skronky zeitgeist of its time and place, Fluk enriches our experience of the performance more vividly than a conventional biopic, without including a single note of Jarrett’s music. He does for mid-70s West Germany what 24 Hour Party People did for mid-80s Manchester.
The film showcases a deft, ragtag ensemble: John Magar is superb as a severely crumpled Jarrett, stricken by back pain and depression, laced into a corset for every performance; Alexander Scheer playing ECM founder Manfred Eicher as a baleful Wim Wenders angel, ferrying his stricken artist down the moonlit autobahn in his tiny Renault 4; and Michael Chernus reprising his Ricken from Severance as bumbling jazz hack and unreliable narrator Michael Watts (no relation to the venerable Melody Maker writer).
But the film belongs to Mala Emde as Vera Brandes, jazz bunny and riot grrrl impresario, a tornado temporarily taking the form of a teenage whirl of red hair, miniskirts and a cheshire cat grin. She storms through the tidy strassen of Cologne, determined to take jazz out of the museum and place it at the heart of a wider psychic and cultural revolt against the moribund Federal Republic.
Jarrett’s transcendental improvisations are central to her dream, but her bid to stage a midnight show at the Cologne Opera House is fraught with risk. She has to borrow the deposit from her tyrannical and abusive dad, who wants her to take on the family dentistry business, she has to badger DJs and hawk tickets to promote the show, and worst of all, the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand she’d been promised is nowhere to be found. Minutes before he’s due to take the stage, all she has to offer her disgruntled, dejected artiste is an ill-tempered, untuned baby grand. It’s like offering Odysseus a leaky pedalo.
Somehow she manages to persuade a skeptical Jarrett that the essence of improvisation is risk: the real possibility of spectacular, cataclysmic career-ending failure. Though jazzhounds may sniff at the fast and loose way Fluk plays with the historical record, his films recovers some of the thrilling, precarious spree of Jarrett’s music, before it became the rock on which the church of ECM was founded.
