Venice. Jerichow.

"German director Christian Petzold continues his exploration of ambling lives a bankrupt society in the Venice Competition entry Jerichow, a strong film that further consolidates his reputation as one of Northern Europe's finest auteurs," writes Boyd van Hoeij in Cineuropa.

"The film is an organic extension of Petzold's oeuvre and reunites the director with Nina Hoss and Benno Fürmann, who also headlined his 2003 effort Wolfsburg. Like that film, Jerichow is named after the East German town where most of the events transpire."

Updated through 8/30.

"The story is fairly straightforward and often told: a woman torn between two men," writes Peter Zander in Die Welt. "Those who've found Petzold's recent films Yella and Ghosts too constructed, too heady and too crafted will discover him anew here. Very simply, and with very little dialogue, he allows the images and actors to speak for themselves and create an extraordinary tension."

"A Petzold film like a summing up of all Petzold films," finds the Tagesspiegel's Christina Tilmann: "The Berlin director has worked a number of elements from earlier films into a another hopeless story.... With a forceful consistency, Petzold continues his examination of the precarious and despondent conditions of life in (east) Germany, where existence is defined by money alone. 'You can't love if you've got no money,' says Nina Hoss once."

"Petzold stages a chamber piece of emotions under open skies, a charade at the edge of a forest, a suffocating picnic on a Baltic Sea beach - at times it comes close to open-heart surgery, as in Fassbinder, and then the film returns again to pure Petzold, as when Nina Hoss desperately calls names out into the dark woods and we don't know which of the two men will appear from the darkness." In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Michael Althen finds that Petzold "has achieved a fascinating step forward in his filmography, with inimitable landscapes, with quickly sketched moments of the real world and the everyday."

"The film is a German version of James M Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice," notes Wolfgang Höbel in Spiegel Online. "With Jerichow, and with more ferocity than ever before, Petzold shows himself to be an outstanding director."

Updates, 8/29: "A tightly constructed 'dramatic thriller' in which the tension comes as much from what the characters are thinking as from what they end up doing, Jerichow again confirms writer-helmer Christian Petzold (Yella, The State I Am In) as a world-class talent who remains underappreciated beyond Germany," writes Derek Elley in Variety. "From the opening Steadicam shot, following the back of the main character, Thomas (Benno Fürmann), at a funeral, it's clear for those who know the director's work that the pic could only have been made by Petzold. Hans Fromm's rich (but not ripe) lensing of the east German countryside, and the way in which the camera plunges the viewer straight into the psychological heart of the action, are instant trademarks as the film steers the viewer through a no-flab 91 minutes with absolute precision."

"Petzold's film succeeds most as a character study," writes Dan Fainaru in Screen Daily. "The film's main problem is that its protagonists too often act out of character just to move the narrative forward.... Luckily Fürmann, Hoss and [Hilmi] Sozer give pitch-perfect performances. Sozer, in particular, gives his shrewd and course character a touch of poignancy."

"Sozer is especially persuasive as a rough-edged and crude but decent man who has made a success in business despite rampant prejudice against his Turkish heritage," agrees Ray Bennett in the Hollywood Reporter. "It's the strength demonstrated in Sozer's character that is ultimately betrayed in the way Petzold ends his yarn, which had to end somewhere but didn't have to be so dissatisfying."

The Telegraph's David Gritten finds in Jerichow "a taut psychological thriller about sexual jealousy, money, national identity and betrayal."

Film-Zeit rounds up more reviews in the German press.

Update, 8/30: Peter Zander profiles Hoss for Die Welt (in German).

Posted by dwhudson at August 28, 2008 1:21 PM