This is not life-affirming, hardy-har-har,
two-GREAT-BIG-thumb’s-way-up family entertainment. But it’s not a bad movie,
either.
What director Christian
Petzold has done here is to strip down The Postman Always Rings Twice
to its James M. Cainian fundamentals and set it in Jerichow, a depressed rural
backwater of post-unification former East Germany about sixty miles west of
Berlin.
We hear bells toll as the opening
credits roll in white on a black background. After the action begins, we gather
that these bells toll for the mother of our protagonist, Thomas (Benno Fürmann),
because Thomas is leaving the cemetery where his mother just has been buried.
Gather is all we need do: as Mr.
Donne advised, it is never necessary (and in this story clearly not advisable) to
ask for whom the bells toll.
Someone with a henchman is waiting
for Thomas outside the cemetery. Leon (André T. Hennicke), evidently Thomas’
business partner, is an affluent German from the west who had loaned Thomas €1,000.
Thomas apparently ‘left town’ without telling anyone.
We subsequently learn that Thomas
is a former Bundeswehr soldier who served in a combat role in Afghanistan, but
was dishonorably discharged from the service for undisclosed reasons. But there
does not seem to be much mystery here. One gets the sense that rather than a
dark secret or unspeakable act, Thomas just happened to be in the right place
at the wrong time and ‘one day the axe just fell.’
Out on his ass—again. Thomas is alone,
back in his childhood home: no money, prospects, no future.
Then Ali Özkan (Hilmi Sözer) drives
into his life in a Range Rover blasting Turkish popular music.
Ali, the assimilated, middle-aged son
of gastarbeiters, made good in Germany. He owns a chain of 45 snack bars, a
kind of an immigrant ‘Döner Sultan’—roadside kiosks that sell ethnic food. He lives
within walking distance of Thomas. He also has a drinking problem. This brings
him into contact with Thomas, whom he hires as his driver after he loses his license
for driving while intoxicated.
Ali also has a wife. Laura (Nina
Hoss), an attractive, tall, blonde German woman no longer young—younger than
Ali, roughly Thomas’ age—helps run his business. Laura evidently was headed
nowhere on skids when she and Ali met in a bar where she worked. Ali ‘redeemed’
her, but keeps her in the gilded cage of a prenuptial agreement which states
that if she leaves him, she reassumes responsibility for the €142,000 debt she carried
when they met.
Ali seems to sense that Laura and
Thomas are as though made for one another. Made for one another, yet one
dimensional: they are creatures of blind appetite rather than fertile
imagination, flies intoxicated by free air as they bumble helplessly against
the sheer nylon screen of Ali’s largesse.
James M. Cain might be smiling
somewhere.
Petzold brings a new element to
this story though. Hilmi Sözer’s Ali is a fuller, richer character than his [Greek]
predecessors, and his view is told through the lyrics of the Turkish music he
listens to—the film’s only music, besides the doleful cello music that
characterizes the fruitless lives and disappointments of Thomas and Laura.
It is too bad that the song lyrics
do not get subtitles, because they speak directly for Ali’s state of mind.
After Ali’s brief drive-by audio introduction,
we see him at the beach during an outing with Thomas and Laura singing along
with Gülşen Bayraktar’s Nazar değmesin (May misfortune—i.e., the evil
eye—not spite the happiness of my love), dancing drunkenly in the sand with a
bottle of vodka.
Although the Baltic Sea is at least
100 miles/160 km from Jerichow (and the North Sea farther yet west), the beach
outings and chalk cliffs are lovely locations—and of course critical to the
story.
Dancing and singing against a
background that feels as though it takes him back to his long-ago home near the
eastern Mediterranean, Ali cannot understand why the setting and music does not
move his friend Thomas. Thomas says that Ali reminds him of Zorba the Greek.
Ali puts on Sezen Aksu’s pop love song Sen ağlama (Don’t you cry) and
makes ‘der Deutsche Thomas’ and Laura dance as he stumbles off to get more
vodka.
Laura and Thomas will deceive Ali,
but it is as though Ali expects them to. He seems pained less by their deceit
than by their desperation and limited imagination, these people who would be
his ‘betters.’
As Ali tells his wife: ‘I live in a
country that doesn’t want me with a wife that I bought.’
But as the desperately unhappy
Laura later needlessly tells the equally unhappy Thomas, ‘You can’t love if you
don’t have money. That’s something I know.’
Ali’s decision ends the story. As
the credits roll, we hear Turkish pop diva Nilüfer Yumlu’s Karar verdim
(I decided), which starts roughly like this:
‘I decided to forget/I decided to leave/I
want to get far away from here/Get you out of my mind/I wish I could be happy
like a child./ I decided to forget you/I decided to leave you/No one before/No
one in my life/Hurt me as much as you have’ etc.
(‘Karar verdim unutmaya/Karar
verdim ayrılmaya/Çekip gitsen buradan/Gitsem çok uzaklara /Çocuk gibi mutlu
olsam./ Karar verdim unutmaya seni/Karar verdim ayrılmaya/Daha önce hiç kimse/Hayatımda
hiç kimse/Senin kadar incitmedi böyle…’)
The full lyrics can be found
online, with fair-to-fairly-wobbly translations here and there.
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