The most recognizable member of the “New Berlin School,” Christian Petzold has, with his prior Yella and now with Jerichow, reconfigured classic American films into commentaries on modern capitalist Germany. Whereas the transparent Yella borrowed from 1962’s Carnival of Souls to condemn the means by which his native country’s free-market enterprise has engendered moral rot, the director’s latest recasts James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice as a portrait of the fallout wrought by Germany’s new economic order. Going pulpy suits Petzold far more comfortably than did his previous effort’s foray into metaphysical mystery, as his measured, icy cinematographic style and diegetic soundscape (most frequently populated with the sounds of chirping birds) brings omnipresent unease to the proceedings. Marked by a mood of chilling foreboding, his story concerns a quiet, dishonorably discharged vet named Thomas (a disquietingly unreadable Benno Fürmann) who returns home from Afghanistan to the titular northeastern German town to tend to his mother’s funeral, is promptly cold-cocked by associates eager to collect on outstanding debts, and shortly thereafter finds his penniless circumstances improved by a chance encounter with a drunk driver named Ali (Jilmi Sözer) whom he generously helps home one afternoon.
A Turkish immigrant, Ali manages a number of regional snack bars, and when his license is revoked for DUI, he hires Thomas to chauffeur him on his daily rounds. Just as Thomas lied about his cash flow to his creditors, so too do Ali’s employees regularly attempt to skim the pot. Monetary treachery is seemingly the name of everyone’s game, including Ali’s wife Laura (Yella’s Nina Hoss, exuding stifled misery and desperate need), who, it’s soon revealed, is an ex-con that married Ali because he could help pay off her enormous, unspecified debts – making their marriage, in effect, a purchase – and who has been carrying out her own surreptitious cookie jar-pilfering scam under her gruff hubby’s nose. When Thomas first meets Laura, their interaction amounts to merely a financial transaction. And though the two soon develop more amorous feelings for each other – this despite the fact that Thomas knows about Ali’s jealousy, having accompanied him on a spousal spying mission – their romance is rooted in economic concerns. Jerichow posits fiscal considerations as the dictating force behind all behavior and emotion, epitomized by Laura’s lament to Thomas, whom she loves but cannot run away with lest she again get saddled with the pecuniary responsibilities Ali has alleviated, that “You can’t love, if you don’t have money.”
Petzold has his noir-ish scenario play out primarily in the bright daytime sun, his countryside and beach settings – an ocean-overlooking cliff plays a prominent role in Thomas and Laura’s eventual plot – depicted as harsh, unforgiving, alienating locales where motivations and actions can never be concealed. As Thomas and Laura embark upon their surreptitious affair, the director plays with our expectations, patiently depicting his protagonists’ secretive courtship (highlighted by a beautiful sequence in which Thomas sneaks a nocturnal embrace with Laura while Ali stumbles about in the nearby dark) as a means of stoking anticipation for their predetermined decision to take drastic measures to be together. The mounting suspense never quite reaches a blistering boil, but by protracting his set-up, Petzold nonetheless achieves and maintains an effective level of intrigue. Assuredly paced and designed so that each key moment pivots around the issue of money, Jerichow ultimately arrives at a dénouement that may not surprise. Yet in its gorgeous final tableau of reckless, greed-fostered destruction, the film addresses the modern German condition with a potent noir strain of despondent fatalism.