(Christian Petzold, 2014)
Petzold's control just gets more nuanced and precise by the movie. This noir set in the rubble of post-war Berlin and haunted by the shadow of the Holocaust is a frustrating, cold but compelling watch until an extraordinary climactic scene transforms it into something transcendent.
Nina Hoss plays Nelly, a Berlin singer who has barely survived Auschwitz and is horribly disfigured. After plastic surgery, while she awaits transport to Palestine, she searches for her husband Jonny (Roland Zehrfeld) through the ruins of the city and eventually finds him working in a nightclub in the American sector. Assuming she is dead, he doesn't recognise her but sees that she somehow resembles his wife and involves her in a scheme which involves her pretending to be herself while he remakes her in Nelly's image, adjusting her walk, hair and make-up, buying her clothes...
In this way an entirely twisted romance plays out, as Nelly re-learns herself through the eyes of the husband who hid and protected her but may have given her up to save himself.
Petzold has a minimalist, deceptively simple style that demands much of his cast. But Hoss and Zehrfeld are equal to the task, each delivering in tricky parts. Hoss is sensational, evoking her character's traumatised fragility in her face but also her body language, then slowly blooming as she re-discovers her husband and the reality of her past. Zehrfeld is always conflicted by what he is doing: desperate yet furious with himself, drawn to this woman he knows cannot be his wife. That intense final scene is all about their faces and they are both immense, giving it an emotional charge which is shattering.
Prior to that the film is a noir and appropriately tense. Berlin is all shadows and bombed-out houses, off-duty US soldiers and furtive encounters in alleyways. Petzold prominently references Eyes Without A Face and Vertigo. And yet the holocaust gives his film a sting unlike either of those films, best manifested in the character of Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), working to get herself and Nelly to Palestine and sadly tracking down the evidence that the rest of their friends died in the camps. Her fate is cold and shocking, and it seems to foreshadow that ending, where Nelly's serial number tattoo is seen for the first time.
Showing posts with label Christian Petzold. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christian Petzold. Show all posts
Saturday, 23 May 2015
Friday, 28 December 2012
BARBARA
(Christian Petzold, 2012)
The brilliance of Petzold's work to date is the way he imposes his precisely observed, muscularly realist style upon material that is usually the stuff of thrillers. He uses confident, spacious framing and superbly measured movement of the camera and editing to set a deliberate pace to each of his films. This is solid, near-faultless storytelling, slowly revealing the depths and passions of the characters depicted, detailing the nuances and turns of plot without artifice or trickery.
Barbara may be his best film; a tidy, intense little character drama which hides a gripping, emotionally charged thriller inside its folds like one of the title characters hidden packages.
Barbara Wolff (Nina Hoss) is a doctor, sent to work in a clinic in the Provinces of East Germany in 1980. She has applied to leave for the West, and suffered an incarceration and this exile for her sin against Communism. At the clinic, she is monitored for the state by her colleague Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld) a sensitive, friendly man with his own history to account for his exile. As their relationship haltingly develops, Barbara is planning her escape to her lover in the West, but her emotional involvement with a couple of young patients makes things more complicated than she would like.
There is absolutely nothing ostentatious or showy about Petzold's work. Every cut and composition seems motivated purely by its value to the story he is telling. There is no generic iconography and no cues: no dramatic or emotive music (only diagetic music, in fact), no scenery chewing, no hamming, no massive plot twists or reversals. Instead he details the quotidian facts of his characters lives and work, and allows these details to build up to something more. The performances are understated and as subtle as the period detailing, which is founded on telling particulars: some wardrobe choices, the ubiquity of cigarettes, the automobiles and landline telephones.
Hoss and Zehrfeld are both quietly brilliant, suggesting their growing attraction (and much more) without doing very much, and Petzold is just as careful in how he underlines the effect of living under the watchful gaze of a Communist state. Everything is subtly effected - what people can buy, where they can work, who they talk to, how they live. It paints a disturbing picture of lives curtailed and bent by state interference without ever proselytzing.
The tension grows as the story progresses and Petzold ties together the various strands neatly and with considerable emotional impact in the last act, which is extremely satisfying, like the film as a whole.
The brilliance of Petzold's work to date is the way he imposes his precisely observed, muscularly realist style upon material that is usually the stuff of thrillers. He uses confident, spacious framing and superbly measured movement of the camera and editing to set a deliberate pace to each of his films. This is solid, near-faultless storytelling, slowly revealing the depths and passions of the characters depicted, detailing the nuances and turns of plot without artifice or trickery.
Barbara may be his best film; a tidy, intense little character drama which hides a gripping, emotionally charged thriller inside its folds like one of the title characters hidden packages.
Barbara Wolff (Nina Hoss) is a doctor, sent to work in a clinic in the Provinces of East Germany in 1980. She has applied to leave for the West, and suffered an incarceration and this exile for her sin against Communism. At the clinic, she is monitored for the state by her colleague Andre (Ronald Zehrfeld) a sensitive, friendly man with his own history to account for his exile. As their relationship haltingly develops, Barbara is planning her escape to her lover in the West, but her emotional involvement with a couple of young patients makes things more complicated than she would like.
There is absolutely nothing ostentatious or showy about Petzold's work. Every cut and composition seems motivated purely by its value to the story he is telling. There is no generic iconography and no cues: no dramatic or emotive music (only diagetic music, in fact), no scenery chewing, no hamming, no massive plot twists or reversals. Instead he details the quotidian facts of his characters lives and work, and allows these details to build up to something more. The performances are understated and as subtle as the period detailing, which is founded on telling particulars: some wardrobe choices, the ubiquity of cigarettes, the automobiles and landline telephones.
Hoss and Zehrfeld are both quietly brilliant, suggesting their growing attraction (and much more) without doing very much, and Petzold is just as careful in how he underlines the effect of living under the watchful gaze of a Communist state. Everything is subtly effected - what people can buy, where they can work, who they talk to, how they live. It paints a disturbing picture of lives curtailed and bent by state interference without ever proselytzing.
The tension grows as the story progresses and Petzold ties together the various strands neatly and with considerable emotional impact in the last act, which is extremely satisfying, like the film as a whole.
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