TIFF08: Composing the shot and cooling the heat

Above: Nina Hoss is the wife yearning for sexual and financial escape in Jerichow.

Traveling the same aesthetic path as Unspoken of expert, ineffective upper/middle-brow Euro art-cinema, Christian Petzold’s film Jerichow (Germany) is precise, almost exquisitely so. It is the art film as storyboard cinema, the Coens and Spielberg transposed to the rhythms and themes of that more solemn genre. Yet such deliberateness, when carried through without inspiration, is a dead weight dragging on a film, and ambiguity rapidly goes down with the ship. Jerichow is an adaptation of The Postman Always Rings Twice, and in a cinema that is so thought through and meticulous, with each shot perfectly composed, each edit planned in the head if not in the script before filming ever started, a story so familiar only makes the weight of determination and predictability all the more forceful.

That is not to say the film is empty, strong-willed form.  There is an elegant simplicity in Petzold's clean look and genre-like no-nonsense plot, and a quality of light, in combination with the sharp shot/reverse-shots of the photographer's tableaux, that gives Jerichow a Chabrolian allure of a sleek honing of craft for effect.  Yet it is hard to believe that something given so much thought is rendered so incredibly steady, so inevitable; Jerichow is sucked dry of blood by the film’s own craft, one which is secure, confident, pristine. Bloodless can be a successful aesthetic, of course—look no further than Michael Haneke for the paradigm—, but in a story where passion, dissatisfaction, cruelty, and, ultimately good-heartedness are the driving forces—in a word, a melodrama—treating the movement of the film not as a dynamic, volatile thing but something straightforward, predictable, and regularized lends no commentary to the convention, no room for gray, for ambiguity, for interpretation. Instead, the film becomes off-hand, a trifle, an exercise in style, and a sharp looking, but dull one at that.