(This is part of ongoing St. Louis International Film Festival coverage. Please click Festivals above for more reviews.)
This loose visit to The Postman Always Rings Twice throws the whole notion of new German cinema for a loop. But this is what Christian Petzold seems good at: throwing things off balance. Every jot and tittle of the film is intensely precise, as if engineered rather than directed. The landscape shots of this lush rural corner of Germany are clinically framed, every kind of movement in the film is exacting – it is an almost intimidating auteur experience.
But at the heart of the film lies an unruly mess of racial, cultural, and psychological currents that threaten to upset Petzold’s careful staging. The whole thing is a balancing act between genre and suspense, but also between theory and cinema, or even better – between Petzold’s ideas about cinema and the way they relate to these avatars of contemporary Germany.
Dishonorably discharged from the war in Afghanistan, Thomas is broke and sleeping on his recently deceased mother’s floor. He picks up whatever odd jobs he can until Ali, a local kebab shop tycoon with a few too many drunk driving convictions, hires him on as a delivery driver. On the other end of this classic noir triangle is Laura, who at first glimpse seems to be Ali’s trophy wife. Quiet but sternly masculine Thomas, the successful yet somewhat furtive Ali, and the textbook sultry Laura – you can tell where this is going. But then, as it turns out, we can’t. The basic genre building blocks are all there, but they start getting pushed around by Ali’s Turkish heritage, whatever it is that has followed Thomas home from Afghanistan, and Laura’s secrets.
It is hard to tell exactly where the film pivots on Petzold’s sleight of hand, but we are confronted by the fact that there is some sort of depth to Jerichow that is so often unexpected in genre film. It becomes contemporary, aware, critical, and provocative all at once. Implicit to Petzold’s direction is a criticism of the kind of race baiting that happened in Crash. In place of that unsubtle fearmongering stereotyping, he leaves these complex scenes that speak intensely to the psychological and racial diversity of his characters. The final moments of Jerichow happen so quickly, but resonate with a lot of unexpected issues.
The search for Fassbinder in recent German cinema is an engaging routine of critical play, but seems to be one that loses traction in Petzold’s direction. The way he embeds drama in perfectly staged sets of noise, landscape, and suspense – even melodramatic eros, makes any commentary on Fassbinder less interesting than his contemporary significance as a filmmaker that avoids the excesses of minimalist cinema and technique on the one hand, and clumsy social critique on the other. This is not to say that Jerichow represents a middle way, but that the Berlin School, which many suggest he represents, stands on its own two feet as a solution to a difficult representational problem. How do you make cinema that is obviously interested in theory without getting bogged down in concept? How do you think socially and cinematically at the same time? Where is this camera supposed to sit? Jerichow is a great answer to such niggling questions.