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| Jerichow | |||
"The early scenes of Jerichow are an object lesson in the slow release of dramatic information. Drop by drop, this man’s story accrues: he is called Thomas, he was with the German Army in Afghanistan, his mother has just died, he is living alone in her house, and, apart from that, he has nothing. He seems to have arrived, not at the end of his tether, but simply at an end, radiating dead calm where the rest of us might panic or collapse. He meets a local businessman, a Turkish immigrant named Ali (Hilmi Sözer), who has a string of snack bars, which he runs on a tight rein, and a German wife, Laura (Nina Hoss), who is no less under his command. Ali needs a driver — and, you sense, a friend — and Thomas fits the bill. You know what happens next. In particular, if you know The Postman Always Rings Twice, in either version, or Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, or the James M Cain novel from which the three movies sprang, the shape of the tale, in which a drifter enters a dry marriage and starts a blaze, might feel all too familiar. But those were hot numbers, whereas Petzold, the most cool-headed of the younger German directors, has siphoned the steam out of the story. Sex — curtailed, despairing, without a hint of raunch — is never the issue here. Laura and Thomas are not electing to be lovers but, at a more basic level, fighting to become living souls. As for Ali, Sözer’s careful performance deepens the role of the cuckold to a degree that none of the Cain movies could be bothered with. He is brutish and unhappy (brutish because unhappy), doing well from his adopted land yet lying low, somehow, as if he were an illegal refugee. No wonder he is given a diagnosis of a bad heart; it clearly belongs elsewhere. “I live in a country that doesn’t want me, with a woman that I bought,” he says. That last detail refers to Laura’s debts, which he took on when he married her. Thomas, too, begins the movie among loan sharks, and Petzold has remarked, in a statement on the film, that not until he viewed the finished work did he realize “there is not a single scene in which money doesn’t play a role.” In short, Jerichow is the right movie at the right time — and, with its dangerous stealth, it unfolds in the right place, too, among the flat fields and the half-deserted roads of Jerichower Land, in the former East Germany. Cash is tight (almost everyone, Laura included, tries to chisel Ali out of his profits), and employment is thin on the ground… “I love you, Laura,” Thomas tells her. “You can’t love, if you don’t have money,” she says, like someone rebuking the Beatles. So compact and controlled is this fine film, with its bitter closing twist, that, against your instincts, and despite your prayers, you fear that she may be right." – Anthony Lane, New Yorker Presented in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut. |
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| Germany 2008 | |||
Director/Screenplay: Christian Petzold With: Benno Fürmann (Thomas), Nina Hoss (Laura), Hilmi Sözer (Ali Ozkan), André M. Hennicke (Leon), Claudia Geisler (specialist), Marie Grube (cashier), Knut Berger (policeman) 94 mins, 35mm (1,85:1) In German, with English subtitles M violence, offensive language, sex scenes Tekapo Film Society |
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