"Köln 75" attempts to tell the remarkable true story of Vera Brandes, who at just 17 became an accidental jazz concert promoter responsible for Keith Jarrett's legendary Cologne Concert. Unfortunately, the film hits too many wrong notes to create a harmonious whole.
The premise is fascinating: a teenage jazz enthusiast finds herself organizing concerts while sacrificing her education, family relationships, and planned medical career. The generational conflict between father and daughter serves as the film's emotional core, while the backdrop of 1970s jazz culture provides atmospheric texture.
However, the execution falters in several key areas. Most glaringly, the film's inability to secure rights to Jarrett's actual music or cooperation from the musician himself creates an ethical dilemma that the production never satisfactorily resolves. How do you make a film centered around one of history's most celebrated improvised piano performances without the actual music or blessing of its creator? This absence leaves a void at the film's center that no amount of narrative workarounds can fill.
The portrayal of Keith Jarrett is particularly problematic. He's depicted primarily through suffering-physical pain, artistic frustration, and the indignities of poor venue conditions-building toward a transcendent performance that the audience never actually experiences. It's a cinematic tease without payoff.
The age discrepancy between the teenage protagonist and the significantly older actress playing her creates another layer of dissonance. Combined with numerous "let's pretend" moments where the film skirts around its inability to depict key elements authentically, the result feels less like artistic license and more like compromised storytelling.
What could have been an insightful exploration of artistry, generational divides, and unexpected coming-of-age instead feels disjointed and incomplete. Perhaps the most awkward moment comes when a music journalist character breaks the fourth wall to deliver a lecture on jazz evolution and Jarrett's innovations directly to the audience. This exposition dump, with its superficial explanations and random factoids, feels lifted straight from a Wikipedia page-a clumsy attempt to provide context that the film itself fails to establish organically.
The film offers glimpses of what might have been-the entering an adult life teenage adventures of securing an opera hall, finding the right piano, and selling tickets which provide some genre specific charm-but these moments can't compensate for the fundamental disconnects at the film's core.
"Köln 75" ultimately hits too many false notes to resonate with the power of the legendary musician and the jazz music itself that inspired it.
