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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
JERICHOW Jerichow is only the second of Christian Petzold’s 10 films to be commercially released in the U.S. Considered part of the “New Berlin” school for his intimate and uneasy looks at post-reunification capitalism, his geographic and political subtleties can go past American viewers. While actors Benno Fürmann and Nina Hoss have made several films with Petzold, their charged presence here in the town of Jerichow, in the former East Germany, makes economic analysis secondary. The lure of money brings their characters together and frustrates a triangle inspired by the novel The Postman Always Rings Twice. Money pressures are haunting army vet Thomas (Fürmann) from the first moments we see him, even at his mother’s funeral. Right afterwards, he is followed by a car, which in any noir signals a lender who wants to be repaid. All Thomas wants to do since his discharge from the army is fix up his mother’s house and settle down, or so he insists to his angry financier, who cannily finds and takes Thomas’s hidden stash of cash. Broke, Thomas later makes the bureaucratic rounds of job hunting, finds exhausting work harvesting cucumbers, and humiliatingly shops with the equivalent of food stamps. So he’s got nothing left to lose when he helps a drunk driver foil the police and get home to an expensive house in the woods, or when he later agrees to work for the man. Ali (Hilmi Sözer), his new boss, is a successful immigrant entrepreneur who has built up a successful chain of snack shops by hiring his Turkish countrymen and keeping tight track of every euro. Thomas starts out as his driver, and willingly becomes his muscle. Someone else notices his muscles, the boss’s pretty, younger wife Laura (Hoss, who was also captivating in Petzold’s Yella). Despite Ali’s trigger-temper and paranoid jealousy, Thomas and Laura can barely keep their eyes off each other. When Ali takes them to a celebratory beach picnic, he joyfully dances around them to Turkish pop music (Thomas’s comparing him to Zorba the Greek not only annoys Ali but references the husband Nick the Greek from the James Cain novel.) He insists Thomas and Laura dance together, and once they touch, everything changes as if they were struck by lightning. They can barely keep their hands off each other, any place, any time, inside, outside, all around the house. Their lust and longing are more exciting than when they actually have sex, and this is the first internationally released film that takes full advantage of Fürmann’s screen magnetism since Tom Tykwer‘s The Princess and the Warrior. Even with all the spying and
panting, Laura is still more interested in her financial independence
from Ali and pointedly insists “You can’t love if you don’t have money.”
Instead of ratcheting up the tension among three people who each have
secrets and lies, their scheming against her husband comes as a bit of a
let down. The ironic denouement doesn’t match the fever pitch of the
build up. But until they treacherously return to that fateful beach, the
walls of Jerichow fall down just from the heat Fürmann and Hoss
generate. Nora Lee Mandel
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