Classic Movie Review: Yella (2007)

Yella (2007)

Directed by: Christian Petzold.

Written by: Christian Petzold.

Starring: Nina Hoss (Yella Fichte), Devid Striesow (Philipp), Hinnerk Schonemann (Ben), Burghart Klausner (Dr. Gunthen), Barbara Auer (Barbara Gunthen), Christian Redl (Yella’s Father).

 

Christian Petzold specializes in endings. From Jerichow to Phoenix to Transit, his films often leave the best moment for last, leaving you staggering out of the movie. Over his career, he has gotten even better at the rest of the film as well – Phoenix is a great film, with an even better ending for instance, whereas Jerichow is a good film, with a great ending. His breakthrough film may well have been Yella – made the year before Jerichow, and like that film also an unofficial remake – this time of the low budget 1960s chiller Carnival of Souls. It is a good film, and it tries to do what Petzold would later pull off wonderfully, by shocking you at the end – but this time, it doesn’t really work. Yes, it’s consistent with the ending of the older film – but it lacks the impact this time around – and feels more transparently like he is trying to shock you.

 

The title character in the film is played by Petzold favorite Nina Hoss – and it’s another great performance by her. She plays a woman, trying to escape from her husband Ben (Hinnerk Schonemann) – but not quite being able to do so. She is going to leave town to take a new job away from him – he has taken to stalking her, trying to be nice and win her back, and erupting in anger when she ignores him. She unwisely accepts a ride to the station from him for her final getaway. The pair crash off a bridge, into the water below. And yet, Yella escapes the car, runs to the station, and still makes the train.

 

Her escape doesn’t go as planned however – she arrives at her new job, to discover that her new boss has just been fired, and there’s no job for her. She ends up meeting Philipp (Devid Striesow), a banker on the shady side, who invites her to pose as an associate at an upcoming meeting. She’s smart though – and takes over that meeting – and soon they are partners for real. But what really is he up to?

 

For the moment Yella escapes from the water, there is something deliberately off about app film – something in the tone, in Hoss’ performance, that suggest that perhaps things aren’t quite what they seem. You worry for Yella – that perhaps she is just trading one problem relationship for another, because, of course, her and Philipp are romantic partners as well. But there doesn’t seem to be much heat between them – they are saying the right things, but appear to be going through the motions. She is clearly a woman trapped – no other job, no money, no place to go that isn’t right back to her father, and she wants him to stop worrying, not worry more.

 

If you’ve seen Carnival of Souls, you probably know where this is all headed – it’s a ghost story, without any ghosts in a way. The film doesn’t have the impact of the earlier film – if for no other reason than it doesn’t have that extremely creepy climax at an actual carnival. The film will answer the questions – will resolve what happened, and why the film feels so weird, but it’s all done in a final shot meant to leave you stunned, but didn’t for me.

 

What remains fascinating about the film though is that strange, otherworldly tone that Petzold sustains through the film – and Hoss’ haunting and haunted performance. Her Yella remains an enigmatic figure in the best way – not in a way that frustrates, but in a way that makes you want to know more. What Petzold needed to do is what he did in Jerichow – take a well-known story, with a well-known ending, and twist it just enough to shock you. This time, he doesn’t stick the landing – but there’s enough fascinating stuff to make it still an interesting film.

Classic Movie Review: Jerichow (2008)

Jerichow (2008) 

Directed by: Christian Petzold.

Written by: Christian Petzold.

Starring: Benno Fürmann (Thomas), Nina Hoss (Laura), Hilmi Sözer (Ali Özkan). 

 

Christian Petzold’s Jerichow isn’t an official adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice – but it’s clear that it is one anyway. Petzold is smart enough to realize that if he was going to, once again, redo a story that has been told many times already, he had to come with a new angle. For the most part, he succeeds. While this is a shorter film than either of the official adaptations of the novel, he actually spends more time getting to the point where the novel turns – and then Petzold (as he does often) just ends the film there – leaving the audience to pick up the pieces, and figure out what comes next. What’s even more impressive is even if you know the story he’s telling, Petzold still surprises you.

 

The film takes place in the small German town of the title. Thomas (Benno Fürmann) has just returned from Afghanistan – having received a dishonorable discharge, for reasons not explained – and has just buried his mother. He’s broke, he has no job, and some tough guys have beaten him up to get the money he owes them – money he was going to use to rebuild his life. By chance, he meets Ali (Hilmi Sözer) along the road, when Ali, drunk, drives his car into a ditch. Thomas helps him out of the jam with the cops – and Ali ends up offering him a job as his driver. He doesn’t own a roadside diner this time around – but a string of snack bars all over the place, and he spends most of his driving around, checking up on them, making deliveries, etc. Ali’s beautiful, younger wife Laura (Petzold favorite Nina Hoss) does the books. It’s clear to the audience when Thomas and Laura lock eyes what is going to happen.

 

The key difference in Jerichow, compared to the other films, is in the depiction of Ali. The husband in these adaptations is most often painted as dim and pathetic – a man who doesn’t realize what is happening, until it is too late. That isn’t Ali. He is a Turk, who has come to Germany and made something of himself. He believes everyone is always cheating him – and while that isn’t an attractive feature in most people, in this case, he isn’t wrong. Ali is the most complicated character in the film – he can be both a brute – physically and verbally abusive, but also sympathetic. He is keenly aware that he is a foreigner in a country who doesn’t like him, who has a beautiful wife, but only because he paid off her debts, and that she has never, and will never, love him.

 

Hoss is, as always, great as Laura. This is more akin to the Lana Turner performance in the 1946 version – a woman who has been beaten down by life, who is exhausted and miserable, but sees no way out. Hoss is, of course, a beautiful woman – but mainly what she plays here is just tired. She keeps her feelings for Thomas more enigmatic that other versions – perhaps she is just using him to get what she wants. Fürmann is the weakest link in the cast – he is tall and good looking – but kind of a blank slate. This works for those earlier scenes, but when the ending comes, you want a little bit more than what Fürmann can, or at least will, give you.

 

Petzold has always specialized in endings – for knocking you out in the final scene, and then getting out quickly. His best film, Phoenix, has one of the best final scenes of the last decade. And here, it’s the best scene in the film as well. For the first 85 minutes of Jerichow, it is a very good film – tweaking the original story, twisting it into something slightly different, more modern, more German, etc. And then there comes the final scene – and it elevates the whole movie, puts everything we’ve seen into a different light. Petzold knows how to end the film – and Jerichow is a great example.

Movie Review: Transit

Transit **** / *****

Directed by: Christian Petzold.

Written by: Christian Petzold based on the novel by Anna Seghers.

Starring: Franz Rogowski (Georg), Paula Beer (Marie), Godehard Giese (Richard), Lilien Batman (Driss), Maryam Zaree (Melissa), Barbara Auer (Architect / Frau), Matthias Brandt (Barmann / Erzähler), Sebastian Hülk (Paul), Alex Brendemühl (Mexican Consul), Trystan Pütter (American Consul). 

 

The past and present co-exist is Christian Petzold’s Transit – a film that adapts a 1944 novel by Anna Seghers, and updates it to the modern day, without really changing all that much. It is a story about a Frenchman, Georg (Franz Rogowski) who barely escapes Paris, and makes his way to Marseilles – and wants nothing more than to get out of the country – but has no way of doing so – at least not until he realizes he can pose as a famous writer than the Mexican Consul has granted a visa to. He can do this because he was supposed to deliver a letter to the writer in his hotel room, and when he arrived, all he found was his papers, a bath tub full of blood – an apparent suicide. Now he has a way out – and only three weeks to wait until he can leave. But those weeks have a way of complicating things – first when he meets a young boy, Driss, and his mother – who have no hope of leaving, and want his help, and next when he meets Marie (Paula Beer), the wife of the writer his is currently pretending to be – and doesn’t reveal his secret. A love triangle of a sort develops between him, Marie and Richard (Godehard Giese), a doctor also on his way to Mexico – but it’s a fruitless love triangle, because Marie now realizes that she is in love with her husband – even though it was a letter from her dumping him that inspired the suicide she still does not know about. 

 

This is all fairly familiar territory for a WWII story – it’s not entirely unlike Casablanca, except none of its characters are all that noble. But Petzold doesn’t set the film during WWII – he sets in a kind of quasi-present. We see modern graffiti on the walls, electric cars on the road, and many other trappings of modernity – but tellingly, not computers or cellphones (perhaps because it would be too easy to figure out someone like Georg was lying otherwise). The result is strange and surreal – a Kafka-esque nightmare of the film that doesn’t really take place in the past or the present, but a strange combination of the two that never really existed. The current refugee crisis with everyone trying to flee into Europe is the ironic backdrop to this story, where everyone wants to get out, but no one can.

 

Because, ultimately, Transit is a story about people trapped in limbo – who say they want to leave, but never really go anywhere. The theme is made (probably too) explicit about halfway through when Georg is told a joke about a man who dies, and waits for years and years in an empty room waiting for someone to tell him his fate. When he finally sees someone and asks him, the other person replies “What do you mean? You’ve been in hell all this time”. At this point, and for the rest of the movie, poor dumb bastard Georg doesn’t really understand that the joke is about him.

 

The film embraces the melodrama at its core – like previous Petzold films Barbara and Phoenix – the film is built on coincidences, and has a plot built upon the fact that none of the characters can really be truthful with each other – if they were, the whole thing would unravel rapidly. The performances are all fine – Rogowski is excellent as the unknowing pawn in this game – Beer even better as Marie, full of regret and sadness. None of them know that their problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

 

Therein may lie the problem with Transit – what keeps it a very good movie, instead of a great one. Their problems don’t matter, they are merely pawns in this game and they don’t even know they are playing. The film remains more of an intellectual exercise than anything else – and lacks the masterful final moment of Phoenix that transformed that film into something greater. It’s still very good – another excellent film for Petzold. When something is this ambitious and complex, it’s seems odd to complain too much.

Movie Review: Phoenix

Phoenix
Directed by: Christian Petzold.
Written by: Christian Petzold and Harun Farocki based on the novel by Hubert Monteilhet.
Starring: Nina Hoss (Nelly Lenz), Ronald Zehrfeld (Johannes 'Johnny'), Nina Kunzendorf (Lene Winter), Michael Maertens (Arzt), Imogen Kogge (Elisabeth).

Phoenix is an example of how one scene can elevate an entire movie. The majority of the film is quite good – an obvious homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) that strikes a more somber tone, which is appropriate since the main character is a woman who has just been released from Auschwitz, at the end of WWII. Phoenix is a very good movie for most its runtime – smart, sensitive, wonderfully photographed and acted. But it is the final scene of Phoenix that truly makes the movie a must-see – it is a quiet stunner.

The film opens with Nelly (Nina Hoss) being driven back across the border into Germany by her friend, Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorf). Nelly has suffered horribly at the camps – her face is bloody and scarred, and Line takes her to a plastic surgeon to repair the damage. The surgeon suggests picking an entirely new face – he’ll never be able to match it to precisely what it was before, and this way may be easier – but Nelly is insistent: she wants to look like her old self. The result is close – but not right on. Lene and Nelly are to stay in Germany for just a short while – Nelly is entitled to a significant amount of money inherited because his entire family was killed. After they receive it, Lene and Nelly are to go to Palestine – to help establish their new country. But Nelly doesn’t want to go – she wants to find Johnny – her non-Jewish husband. Lene tries to convince her not to – there is quite a bit of circumstantial evidence to suggest Johnny may well have been the one who turned Nelly in to the Germans in the first place. But Nelly wants her old life back. It doesn’t take her long to find Johnny – who now goes by Johannes – who sees her and immediately comes up with a plan. His wife, he tells her, is dead – but she looks similar enough that they may be able to fool people. If they can, they can split the money his wife is supposed to get. Thinking eventually he’ll figure out who she really is, and that he will love her when he does – Nelly agrees to take part in this plot – slowly being “taught” by Johnny to be his wife, who, of course, she already is.

This is a similar plot to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, of course, where James Stewarts falls in love with a woman who he cannot save, and tries to teach her doppelganger to be her – not knowing that the woman he is making over is the woman he originally fell in love with. Vertigo is a masterpiece – elected by the Sight & Sound survey in 2012 as the greatest film ever made. Phoenix is not in that league – but then again few films are. But Phoenix is a skillfully made film from the start – taking place in a bombed out Berlin, where every corner holds danger – as someone is looking to take advantage of Nelly. For her part, she is still suffering a pretty severe case of PTSD – not able to articulate her feelings, and living in a kind of denial. Her friends tries to snap her out of it, but it really is of no use. When Lene tries to convince her to go to Palestine, by telling Nelly, who worked as a singer before the war, that there is a Jewish choir she can join, Nelly asks her why she would want to join that – she isn’t Jewish. Of course, she is Jewish, even if she didn’t live like one before the war. She is trying to deny what has happened to her.

We see this in Johnny – and later in his friends – all of whom are non-Jewish Germans, who do not want to think at all about the “camps”, or what happened there – who do not want to accept any responsibility for them, or what happened. Nelly asks Johnny what she will say to people who want to know about the camps, and he tells her not to worry about it – no one will ask. He makes her up – so that when she steps off the train for the first time, she will be wearing a fancy dress and shoes. “Do you really think people leave the camps like that?” she asks him – and again, he doesn’t care, and says no one else will either. The German people would be far happier to just ignore what happened and move on. Johnny’s friend are welcoming to Nelly when she returns – and try to pretend like nothing happened. We see this throughout Phoenix – people denying the past, failing to see what is directly in front of them, because it’s easier not to.

Petzod is a talented director – and Hoss has become his muse (they have worked together at least 6 times now). Phoenix is even better than their last film – the wonderful Barbara (2012), about a doctor in East Germany in 1980, banished to the countryside. The film borrows more than just the basic plot from Hitchcock – but also some of his stylistics as well. The film is a slow burner, gradually building momentum until it final scene.

When that scene comes, it’s a stunner. Every review I have seen so far has highlighted the ending – and rightly so – it’s a perfect ending and done with subtlety and skill, and leaves the viewer devastated. Everything that came before that ending in Phoenix is very, very good. The ending is great – and as a result, it elevates the entire film.

Movie Review: Barbara

Barbara
Directed by: Christian Petzold.
Written by: Christian Petzold & Harun Farocki.
Starring: Nina Hoss (Barbara), Ronald Zehrfeld (André), Rainer Bock (Klaus Schütz), Christina Hecke (Assistenzärztin Schulze), Claudia Geisler (Stationsschwester Schlösser), Peter Weiss (Medizinstudent), Carolin Haupt (Medizinstudentin), Deniz Petzold (Angelo), Rosa Enskat (Hausmeisterin Bungert).

Christian Petzold’s Barbara is both a melodrama and a thriller, but one that refuses to pump up the action and emotions to the degree that films in both genres usually do. There are no car chases or fight sequences here, no weepy confessions or swelling music to artificially evoke tears or thrills. Instead although Barbara is both a thriller and a melodrama, it plays things straight – and is more of a character study than anything else.

Nina Hoss stars in the title role. It is 1980 in East Germany, and Barbara has been banished from her life in Berlin, and forced to take up her medical practice in a small, country hospital. From the time she arrives, she is watched by everyone – her co-workers, her new boss Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld), and most invasively by the Stasi, who like to pop by and subject her to humiliating surprise inspections. Everyone whispers about her behind her back, but she keeps her head down and does her job. Everyone knows she has a secret – and she does – but she doesn’t let on as to what it is.

Hoss’ performance in this movie is truly masterful. She is asked to do so much, by doing very little. In the early scenes in the movie, she tries to keep a stone face – not let anyone see behind the façade of the tough woman she is putting up. Yet, around the edges of those scenes, her humanity slowly starts to peak through. She isn’t the ice queen she is pretending to be – but just a woman who is justifiably scared, and doesn’t know if she can trust anyone, so she decides to trust no one. But slowly, she starts to loosen up – Andre is nice to her, some of her patients have it even worse than she does, and in the end she cannot ignore her hypocratic oath – “First do no harm”. That can mean many things to many people. Like her country at that time, Barbara is divided – torn between doing what she thinks is right, and doing what she needs to for herself.

Hoss portrays this character as a complex, complete person. Barbara feels more like a real person than most movie characters – who are puppets being put through the motions of the screenwriters grand design. In many ways, Barbara follows the standard plot we expect in this type of movie. And yet, in the hands of Petzold and Hoss (who have worked together five times now), the film feels more natural than that – you buy the clichés more than you usually do, right up to ending which has an inevitability about it that quite simply works.

There have been a lot of movies about the waning days of Communism in the past few years. Romanian cinema is starting to address this period in movies as variant as The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Aurora and 12:08 East of Bucharest. Germany has started as well, with films like the Oscar winning The Lives of Others. Barbara belongs on the list with all of them. It is not as overtly political as many of those films – it doesn’t feel the need to spell it out how bad the Stasi were, but instead treats them as a fact of life that must be dealt with. This is a quiet, haunting film that stays with you long after it ends.