Jerichow
Written and directed by Christian Petzold. With Benno Furmann, Nina Hoss, Hilmi Sozer, Andre Hennicke, and Claudia Geisler. (NR)
The German import Jerichow is a retelling of James M. Cain's erotically charged The Postman Always Rings Twice, and like that story, about a drifter, his married lover, and their plot to kill her husband, one senses from the start that nothing will end well for the three characters who make up the tangled love knot.
Thomas (Benno Furmann) is a thirty-something German recently sent home from his Army unit in Afghanistan with a dishonorable discharge. In debt and alone, he moves into the ramshackle home his recently deceased mother left behind. As he walks along the road one day, he meets Ali (Hilmi S?zer), who, drunk, has nearly driven his car into the river.
When Thomas helps him avoid arrest, Ali—who loses his license anyway a week later—offers him a job as a deliveryman for his string of snack stands in the area. A suspicious, possessive man who is convinced that everyone is trying to cheat him, Ali seems to sense something in his new hire—one is used to giving orders; the other, to taking them—that lets him lower his guard enough to bring Thomas into his confidence.
The balance of power begins to shift when Thomas is introduced to Ali's wife Laura (Nina Hoss), a woman trapped by her past in a stifling, violent marriage. The erotic sparks that ignite between the pair are animalistic; his first thirsty glimpse of her is taken while she wipes the sweat from her armpits, and their subsequent clutches are equally primal moments stolen on wooden floors or against concrete walls.
None of the people here are innocent, but in a trim 90 minutes, director Christian Petzold manages to upend our expectations more than once, producing a dark morality play without any real heroes. Most impressive of all is Sozer's Ali, a Turkish immigrant whose success is underscored by sadness and self-hatred. "I live in a country that doesn't want me," he notes in the film's quiet denouement, "with a woman… that I bought."
*
Terminator Salvation
Directed by McG. Written by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris. With Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Moon Bloodgood, Helena Bonham Carter, Anton Yelchin, Jadagrace, Bryce Dallas Howard, Common, and Michael Ironside. (PG-13)
Terminator Salvation, the fourth installment in a series as seemingly indestructible as its robotic namesake, has all the personality and charm of a Cuisinart, and was apparently edited by one. Trying to update the franchise by producing a grittier, bleached out, post-apocalyptic version, director McG (best known as the genius behind two Charlie's Angels pictures) has instead given us something that feels like the pitch project for an upcoming video game.
Christian Bale stars as John Connor, mankind's eventual savior, but he does little here except run around shooting what seem to be cast-offs from the Transformer series of movies—while earlier Terminator films focused on a single, implacable foe, the machines here take every conceivable shape. One wonders why Skynet, the artificial intelligence the human resistance is fighting, doesn't come up with better ideas; surely there are easier ways to knock off humanity than by creating an army of murderous, bandana-wearing robots? Hasn't it heard of the flu?
The killjoy direction also robs the film of the humor that leavened earlier entries in the series, save for a cameo by a certain governor that drew cheers from a crowded theater. In its place are half-hearted Holocaust references, Mad Max thievery, and explosions—lots of explosions. If this is the future, I say we let the machines have it.
*
Also this week: For years, the legendary Broadway show A Chorus Line gave theater lovers a peek behind the curtain: the musical is built around a group of singers and dancers auditioning for parts in a Broadway musical. With Every Little Step, which is now playing at Amherst Cinema, directors James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo take that central conceit one step further—their film follows a group of singers and dancers auditioning for parts in a recent Broadway revival of A Chorus Line. The head swims.
As the filmmakers explore what makes the musical such an enduring hit, they touch on the gut-wrenching drama of auditions, and the double nature of life in the theater, a life that can lift you up one moment, only to bring you crashing down the next. While we watch the group of young hopefuls, composer Marvin Hamlisch, who wrote the score for the original show, shares his memories of a disappearing Broadway.
In director Olivier Assayas' (Irma Vep, Demonlover) new film Summer Hours, a death in the family brings together three middle-aged siblings who have long lived in separate worlds. Successful designer Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), college professor Frederic and businessman Jeremie descend on the family home when their mother dies unexpectedly, leaving behind a remarkable collection of art. The three find themselves at odds over the fate of the estate—one sibling lives in New York, another in Beijing, and only Frederic, who has settled in Paris, wants to keep the home intact—and as they settle their mother's affairs, they must revisit their shared memories, the loss of their childhood, and their divergent futures.
Assayas, whose films display a propensity for stylistic shape-shifting, makes great use of the objects in the art collection; not simply museum pieces, they hold special significance for each of the children, embodying distant memories, forgotten feelings, and the weight of the past, a past that each sibling must come to terms with alone.
On Friday, the Northampton Committee to Stop the War in Iraq presents a free screening of FTA (Free the Army) at the Media Education Foundation in Northampton. First organized in 1970 by a group of activists and actors including Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, the FTA tour was designed as an anti-war response to Bob Hope's famous USO tour. (The acronym is a play on a saltier troop expression about what to do to the Army.)
The tour visited military bases both stateside and overseas in an attempt to engage soldiers in a dialogue about the war in Vietnam, using what Fonda called "political vaudeville" to get the activists' points across. That led to the film, released in 1972—but, though Fonda had just won an Oscar and Sutherland was a star, the film was pulled from theaters a week later under mysterious circumstances. Director David Zeiger, who made the soldier-rebellion documentary Sir! No Sir! believes the film was the victim of an aggressive White House campaign, stating that "It was the year of Watergate. It was the year of Nixon's horrific, relentless bombing campaign against the people of North Vietnam. And it was the year that the rebellion of soldiers and marines against the Vietnam War spread to the Navy and Air Force. FTA is the film that reveals and revels in that rebellion in a way that no other film did then or had for 35 years, until I made Sir! No Sir!" Today it's back—and in time for another unpopular war."
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
