A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
Christian Petzold has been making movies since the 1990s, but Die Innere Sicherheit ("Internal Security") reportedly was his breakthrough film for the global film audience. I can see why, because it has a crime/terrorism angle and a generation-gap conflict all in one package. As with Jerichow, there seems to be an American influence, though I'm not aware if Petzold acknowledges a superficial resemblance between his story and Sidney Lumet's movie Running on Empty. There's a legitimate German context for his story, but he does admit in a DVD interview that the terrorist context is perhaps just a little out of date for his contemporary story. He keeps things abstract, never saying that the mother and father belong to the Red Army Faction, but that would probably be a German viewer's first assumption. But Hans and Clara don't come off as ideologues; they could just as well be a German Bonnie & Clyde who've survived long enough to have a teenage daughter, with all the complications that brings.
Julia Hummer as Jeanne.
The family starts the story in Portugal, biding their time before starting a new life in Brazil (a surprisingly common motif in global cinema, I'm learning). But a burglary diminishes their funds and draws police attention, so it's back to Germany in search of support from variously compromised comrades until the daughter, Jeanne, suggests that they hole out in a villa a fellow German in Portugal had told her about. Jeanne's at that age where she's growing interested in boys and fashion, and is coming to resent having to move and start over so frequently. When the German surfer dude reappears and tells her that he was just bullshitting her about the villa, she still feels a strong attraction to his free lifestyle. At the same time, her parents are paranoid about her forming any strong ties or compromising their secrecy as they plan a bank robbery that will bankroll their Brazilian trip.
Jeanne's in rebellion against her parents' lifestyle of perpetual rebellion, but there's nothing political about her revolt. The surfer dude, Heinrich, suspects that Jeanne belongs to a cult, and there's something cultlike about the enforced intimacy of the little family's existence. That comes through most dramatically when she has to choose between her parents and striking out on her own, with or without Heinrich. Either way, her decision could have dangerous consequences....
Heinrich (Bilge Bingul) ironically applies the third degree to Jeanne, but he might be better off not knowing what her parents are up to (below).
Between this film and Jerichow I can see something of a Petzold style. Already by this point he has an admirable pictorial clarity and a strong eye for natural and urban landscape and how to direct actors through each. He's a good director of actors and his family of fugitives (Julia Hummer, Barbara Auer and the distractingly big-nosed Richy Muller) all give good performances. Petzold's script (co-written with Harun Farocki) seesaws maybe once too often between Jeanne's family loyalty and her attraction for Heinrich, as if requiring one more tryst in order to set up the film's violent roadside finish. But the actors overcome this contrivance to keep the story compelling. Overall, my weekend Petzold project reveals him as a director who's been good for a while and at age 49 seems to be getting better.
Is there life in the old dog yet? The Cain-ine in this case is that old chestnut, The Postman Always Rings Twice, freely and openly adapted to a post-unification German setting by writer-director Christian Petzold, who is interested in author James M. Cain more as a social realist than as a noir stylist. The original is the story of a drifter's affair with a diner owner's wife and their conspiracy to kill the husband. In Petzold's version the protagonist isn't a drifter, but he is adrift. Thomas (Benno Furmann) is a dishonorably-discharged Afghan War veteran who we meet at his mother's funeral. He's inherited her house in the title town, but all his ready cash ends up in the hands of an angry ex-business partner. To keep himself fed and fund the rehab of the house, he has to take petty seasonal jobs like cucumber picking until he has a random encounter with a drunk driver, Ali Ozman. Thomas agrees to drive him home and tell the police he was driving when the car ditched earlier, thus saving Ali's driver's license. Later, when another incident gets his license revoked, Ali hires Thomas as his chauffeur.
Benno Furmann as Thomas
Ali is a Turko-German who runs a chain of snack bars. Thomas has to take him on his regular run of deliveries and collections, which sometimes get rough when Ali thinks someone is trying to cheat him. Fortunately, Thomas's military martial-arts skills come in handy in a pinch. Ali has a German wife, Laura, who handles purchases from wholesalers. Celebrating Thomas's early success, Ali drunkenly and innocently presses Thomas and Laura together, wanting to see how Germans dance. This beautifully filmed scene is one of Petzold's direct homages to Cain; in Postman the husband is Greek-American, while in Jerichow Thomas tells Ali he dances like a Greek. How the hell do you know how a Greek dances, Ali asks. Answer: Zorba!
It's not until the last act of the movie that Thomas and Laura, lovers by then, think of bumping Ali off. Before that, we see Ali playing Thomas's mentor, quizzing him on how to save fuel on delivery runs, what's the best location for a new snack bar, etc. We see that Ali is suspicious of his shop managers but also soft-hearted. We note ironically that Ali doesn't seem to suspect Thomas of cuckolding him but suspects Laura of cheating with a wholesaler, tracking her to the man's office and slapping her around until the man attacks him. Once again, Thomas saves Ali from danger.
Despite everything, Ali and Laura share some kind of affection and he hopes to bring her to the old country to stay someday, while she feels a debt of gratitude, at least, for his efforts to help her during a rough patch in her life. It doesn't stop her from embezzling from him, but it's there, just as there's an irresistible attraction between her and Thomas. That attraction ultimately drives them to plan Ali's demise, but when he returns from a trip with surprising news, it throws Laura's plans, at least, into dramatic confusion....
Nina Hoss as Laura Ozman
The transplant works. Petzold brings a sensitive social consciousness to the story and its setting, finding in a depleted east Germany an analogue for Cain's Depression America. Petzold sees himself and Cain as fellow critics of capitalist society, interpreting the Postman archetype as a parable of lovers unable to act purely on their passions because of their need or obsession with money. The lovers could just leave the old husband, after all, but because they need his money they have to try to kill him. The tragic irony Petzold adds to the situation is a twist that would render the lovers' conspiracy unnecessary if they hadn't already set it into motion. It makes you look back over the whole story and see how, with different emphasis, it could be told as the poignant tale of a devoted man making plans for his wife's future and putting it in the hands of a good man. But society makes such a reading, which may be how Ali sees his own story, a sad illusion.
Petzold fills his picture with the petty details of small-time German life, from the pervasive immigrant presence to the low-level fast food business. Those everyday elements of a foreign culture make Jerichow even more attractive to me.
This is the first Petzold film I've seen (I have an earlier effort, The State I Am In, on loan from the library to watch later this weekend) and I'm impressed by the clarity of his vision. There's nothing generically noirish about his bright outdoor locations, but his commitment to social realism keeps Jerichow in close kinship with the noir tradition. Benno Furmann, whom I haven't seen before (some Americans saw him in Speed Racer!) is the image of a troubled, world-weary neo-noir tough guy. This performance should get him more work abroad. Nina Hoss and Hilmi Sozer also made strong impressions on me, though Furmann should be the breakout international star of this film. But the main credit belongs to Petzold. Although I'm starting to watch his career work in reverse order, Jerichow makes me eager to see his earlier films, starting immediately.
CinemaGuild, the film's DVD distributor, has uploaded a Jerichow trailer to YouTube.