Christian Petzold's "Jerichow'

German Expressionist film of the Weimar era turned cinema from a medium of popular entertainment into an art form with a vocabulary and episteme of its own. Hitler killed it, and German film has never recovered. The best "German" film of the past 75 years is The Serpent's Egg, a movie made by a Swede, Ingmar Bergman.

There are a number of explanations. The cream of German film talent— Fritz Lang (whom Goebbels tried to recruit to head his film propaganda unit), Billy Wilder and 1,500 others— went abroad, many to enrich Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. (The crowd that fills Rick's place in Casablanca is a Who's Who of underemployed German émigré talent.) The postwar division of West and East Germany created two rival satellite regimes with a single common accord: not to probe the immediate past of the Third Reich.

Not until Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's vast project to interrogate the Hitler years in the 1970s— vast, in part, for the great silence that had preceded it— did a German filmmaker seriously undertake to examine the most consequential period of German history.

Syberberg was part of a brief renaissance of German film in the 1970s. It was dealt a crippling blow by the premature death of Rainer Werner Fassbinder in 1982; and some of its best talents, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders among them, also emigrated. Herzog, in particular, has roamed to the ends of the earth in his film career, as if to say, anywhere but Germany.

The Hollywood siphon

Germany's plight isn't unique. Hollywood continues to siphon off talent, and the high cost of commercial filmmaking spawned the "international" cinema of the 1960s, in which films were bankrolled wherever money could be found (think of Orson Welles's legendary pilgrimages in search of backers), and film casts and crews spoke in a Babel of accents, if not of tongues.

Indigenous film— the work of Bergman, Fellini, Godard and others— led a precarious life in art houses, but such venues have long since disappeared. If the casual American filmgoer sees a European site in a movie theater, it's usually as a backdrop to intrigue or romance: the cinema of tourism.

The unsatisfactory solution to this dilemma is the film festival, in which world cinema is crammed into a week or two of frenzied feeding at inflated prices. Still, a film from Germany— the ranking power of Europe, for whatever that's worth— is a rare event, and commercial release is even rarer. Christian Petzold's Jerichow, recently at the Ritz, is a sly little film that sneaked through, but it announces a significant talent.

A former Soviet outpost

The Jerichow of the title is an actual town on the Baltic coast, although we never see it. Rather, the film is set in a vaguely countrified area with no discernible economic structure. There's a little light industry, and some industrialized agriculture— a horrific but typically understated scene shows the film's antihero, Thomas (Benno Furmann), picking cucumbers on a human conveyer belt— but, like much of eastern Germany, it has the down-at-the-heels look of capitalist underdevelopment that still afflicts former outposts of the Soviet empire. (Thomas casually refers to a "Friedrich Engels Street" at one point; the fact that it hasn't been renamed reminds us how backward the region is.)

Thomas himself is the very definition of down on his luck. He's been dishonorably discharged from service in Afghanistan and left for dead by a loan shark who finds the stash he's been hiding on the day of his mother's funeral, so things can't seem to get any worse for him. But they will.

The immigrant's complex agenda

Walking home with food stamp-bought groceries, Thomas rescues a driver, Ali (Hilmi Sozer), who appears to have drunkenly run off the road. Ali is a Turkish immigrant who has ruthlessly prospered in the fast-food business, and needs a driver and enforcer. As an alternative to the cucumber patch, it's an attractive enough proposition for Thomas, especially with Ali's sultry German wife, Laura (Nina Hoss) thrown in.

At first, Laura seems to ignore Thomas. But Ali, who has a complex agenda, all but throws them together, forcing them to dance for him at a beach picnic and then pointedly leaving them alone. It doesn't take long for either of them to take the hint.

This is, of course, the plot of The Postman Always Rings Twice. But Ali, unlike the pathetic cuckold of the James M. Cain novel and its Hollywood versions, is no dupe, and it's far from clear, to the film's last frame, who's manipulating whom. Ali is ill and says he is dying (though we have only his word for it); he wants his business to go on, partly for his extended family back home and partly to secure his beloved Laura; we see him almost training up Thomas to succeed him. This is straightforward enough.

Master race undertones

But Ali is also a jealous husband who has, as he bluntly confesses, "bought" his wife's affection and assumed, without liquidating, her very substantial debts. He certainly has no particular reason to trust Thomas, and actively tempts Thomas to betray him. Even if Ali's motives are noble— a trait we find scant evidence of in his character— his means are sordid, and, for a shrewd businessman, unacceptably risky.

There's an alternative if somewhat hazier explanation, though. Ali is a member of a despised immigrant community in the land of the former Master Race. Thomas and Laura, both chiseled and attractive, could almost be a poster couple for the Aryan ideal. Ali beats his wife; he is jealous, yes, but he is also branding an expensive possession, and perhaps exacting revenge on a country that will never accept him or his kind. Manipulating Thomas and Laura is an extension of this revenge, even if it comes at his own expense. And whatever future he may have in mind for them, the one he leaves them at the end is the fullest form of revenge.

Sufferings of a bully

These two explanations are not incompatible. Love and hate frequently drive us at the same time, and toward the same object. Petzold, a member of the contemporary Berlin school that foregrounds domestic drama, leaves the matter undecided, but in so doing he creates a memorable character. Thomas and Laura have been ill used by life, but Ali suffers in ways they cannot understand; even as a bully, he is miserable, and he hardly makes a gesture that is not equivocal. Though he is intelligent and cunning, his final motivations— in part because they seem so contradictory— may be opaque even to him, and we are left at the end unable to resolve the question of what his game has been, and whether he has won or lost it. Perhaps both.

The performances are all fine, but Hilmi Sozer's Ali is remarkable. Hans Fromm's photography and Bettina Bohler's cutting are sharp-edged and shrewd, and Stefan Will's score— there is no music for long stretches, although music plays an important role in the film's action— is effective.

Petzold's sensibility is a bit reminiscent of Polanski's in Knife in the Water; and another Petzold film, Yella, has been even more highly regarded in Germany. I hope it can slip through the Iron Curtain of film distribution one of these days.