Köln 75 (2025, Ido Fluk)

64/100

Improvisation rarely appeals to me, instrumental noodling still less, so I’ve never listened to Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert. Nor has Köln 75 exactly jump-started my interest—hardly surprising, since the movie basically ends when Jarrett sits down (and Nina Simone’s rendition of “To Love Somebody” plays over what little of the concert we do see). Instead, writer-director Ido Fluk fashions an entertaining, quick-witted, fast-paced character study of Vera Brandes, the German teenager who not only talked Cologne’s Opera House into hosting its first-ever jazz show (at 11pm, immediately following a performance of Alban Berg’s Lulu) but talked Jarrett into accepting the broken-down rehearsal piano that inadvertently got placed onstage in lieu of a requested Bösendorfer 290 Imperial. In a small way, and even though we never hear a note, the film’s about how creative this Obstruction (per Lars & Jørgen) forced Jarrett to become; Brandes’ final desperate pitch lays it out, insisting that he can transform those acoustic limitations into unexpected strengths by sheer force of will (a result that music critics generally affirm). But the main draw here is lead actor Mala Emde’s personification of pluck, which makes it eminently believable when Vera gets her first booking gig (at age 15!) because Ronnie Scott simply can’t imagine anybody successfully telling her No. It’s a delightfully beguiling turn, at once dogged and insouciant, like Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit filtered through Nina Hoss, and Fluk supports it with various meta-textual elements (e.g., when asked her age early on, Vera says “25,” then turns to us and draws “16” in the air) that are deployed sparingly enough that they don’t grow irksome. The middle stretch that shifts to Jarrett himself (well played by John Magaro), while often amusing, almost feels like a betrayal. At its heart, this is a movie about a very young woman (terrific as she is, Emde’s really much too old for the part) who needs to produce a small miracle because she promised her parents to become a dentist, like her father, if she fails. If you can identify with that sense of existential panic, you’ll more than likely be won over.