JERICHOW
D/ 2008 93min
Director: Christian Petzold
Cast: Benno Führmann, Nina Hoss, Hilmi Sözer
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Threesome in Jerichow (Venezia 65 in Concorso) or “Without money you can’t love”

Almost every film critic present in Venice remarked the connection between Christian Petzold’s contribution in competition “Jerichow” and James M. Caines “The Postman always rings twice”. And I feel obliged to join them in their observations.

It was through a reading a newspaper story whilst directing his former film “Yella”, that Petzold got the idea for his “Jerichow” screenplay, which focuses on Germany’s presence, where wage labour is no longer available or has reached a destructive exploitative status.

Ali, a half bald and slightly overweight self-made man is a “don’t trust anybody”. His paranoid character is confined to control anyone and anything at any time – especially his wife or his employees. The German with Turkish roots has built up his own business running takeaway street stands with Asian and Turkish food around Jerichow, a small town in between the Saxon’s no man’s land. Accidently one night he meets Thomas, a reticent and silent ex-soldier who has furnished himself impromptu in his late mother’s house. After the army dishonourably dismissed him he worked on a cucumber farm transitionally, as a so called cucumber - flyer. Lying hidden in the green harvest with a few other labourers they reap cucumbers all day long riding up and down the field for only a few Euros. Thomas appears to have the demeanour of a person that Ali could possibly begin to trust. But by offering him a job in his company Ali unwittingly grants Thomas admission into his life and thereby Laura’s, Ali’s wife. Bound together through a chain of pendency and obsession they get tangled up in their own intricately woven spider web of lies, passion and desperation. They are prisoners trying to escape their maze to build up a nest. Christian Petzold already considered as one of the refined directors of northern Europe calls it “Homeland-Building”.

Nastily that Homeland-Building at least for Laura - a real ex-prisoner, desperately lost in debts - seems cruelly linked to money, which results in her having to surrender her dreams and settle for a life with Ali.

Petzold believes MONEY to be the films invisible protagonist though unwillingly, he claims in an interview. “I had the feeling that the money has slowly crept into the film, through the pictures and between the characters.” Besides the fact that Jerichow tells a story about betraying - not only others but also yourself – it is a film about surrender while contemporarily trying not to give up. Therefore his blues portray a picture of an almost drowning society with only a few sparks of hope, where life is asking for continual sacrifices.

Compared to his former ghost stories Petzold leads his new film “Jerichow” into a kind of reality fiction about impossible love stories in a lurching society though with his typical gloomy shapes of melancholy.