Two Strangers, One Hamburg Night

ARTE’s long-running Through the Night with… series works best when the pairing makes no obvious sense. Two people, one city, a camera that follows them until the light changes. The show has burned through most of its German celebrity rotation and has started looking further afield. This time: Sasha Grey, retired from porn and sharper than her public image has ever suggested, alongside Mary Ocher, the experimental musician who seems to have made a philosophy out of speaking as little as possible. The city: Hamburg.

The contrast does most of the work for the producers, but it’s not cheap casting. Grey has always had more going on than the obvious biography implies—she reads, she records, she thinks about things. Ocher makes music that sounds like it was composed in an empty building at 3 a.m. and is exactly the kind of company you want when the night doesn’t need a destination. Hamburg, flat and cold and lit by the harbor, is a good city for that kind of wandering.