paloma54 This is really a movie which didn't need to be made. I watched it because I greatly admire Benno Fuhrmann's work in North Face and in Joyeux Noel (a wonderful film, BTW).Enough folks here have done the comparisons with Double Indemnity, etc. etc. The acting and cinematography and realism of this film are all perfectly adequate. However, there isn't much character development, and therefore, not nearly enough to make me care about the 3 main characters. In fact, the one we get to know best is actually the Turkish husband, and I had more sympathy for him in a way that for the two protagonists, largely because we don't really know them. The movie isn't full of a bunch of intriguing plot twists, and the action is relatively slow-moving. The aspect of this film which most interested us was the setting in a part of Germany which none of us have seen. My husband is German, and the part we know is the extreme southwest, nothing northeast. We were also interested to see contemporary Germany actually being depicted. But, I'm sorry, this just isn't enough to justify the amount of time.Producers and directors need to be reminded that people today have a host of other entertainment options available to them and any movie they make should be MORE interesting than say, watching a ballgame on TV, surfing the internet, playing video games, sex with spouse, camping in the woods, going out to dinner with friends, watching YouTube, etc. etc. In other words, having an interesting, entrancing story is, at least in my mind, a good half the value of a film. Unfortunately, so many movies today just don't seem to be aware of the demand for a decent story, and I don't get that. I read a lot of thriller novels, excellently written, all of which would make fantastic films, and furthermore, I know from the authors themselves that they have sold the rights to make a movie from the books. So, I ask myself, why aren't THESE stories becoming movies, instead of a lot of the ho-hum stuff that does become film?

hasosch Jericho lies at the Jordan, in Palestine, Jerichow in Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany. That is used to be in the GDR, you can recognize in the movie by the senseless license-plate initials "JL".Despite the film makers confession that this movie was inspired by "The Postman rings twice", there is for sure another movie, and a German movie, that must have been the direct source of "Jerichow" (2008), although Christian Petzold does not mention it: I mean R.W. Fassbinder's film "The Merchand of the Four Seasons" (1972). Both women - Irmgard and Laura - have no family of their own and married a man whom they never loved. Both Hans and Ali are drinkers. Both are suffering from a heart-disease and both kill themselves at the end. Hans is a green-grocer, Ali sells Turskish fast food. Both women, are relatively attractive and sleep with any other men whenever there is an opportunity. Both Hans and both Ali engage an auxiliary worker for themselves on the basis of confidence, and both wives cheat their men with these coworkers and steal money by aid of them from their husbands. Both Hans and Thomas have been "Blue Helmets", i.e. with the army abroad: Hans in the Foreign Legion, and Thomas in Afghanistan.While is it possible that Fassbinder had used the Postman-novel or the film by James M. Cain, the "Merchant of the Four Seasons" has much more parallels with "Jerichow" than "Jerichow" has with the "Postman". I still think that "Jerichow" is a very good movie, like all movies of Petzold, by the way, but it is a breach of decorum that the actual source has never been mentioned.

A Bastard This isn't about the movie, it's about the comment above that asserts that Jerichow is an area in east Germany that faces the North Atlantic.East Germany has a coast line on the Baltic sea.The rest of Germany has borders with Poland, West Germany and the Czech RepublicBefore you get to the north Atlantic you have to go through the north sea, and maybe the English channel (if you go that way).So Jerichow is no where near the North Atlantic.The rest of that comment should, therefore, be ignored in it's entirety.

Chris Knipp This German director's remake of 'The Postman Always Rings Twice' has a harsh, pared-down intensity that leaves a lasting impression. The husband is a rich Turkish-German businessman, a bottom-feeder made good whom nobody wants around. He's really quite nice--and nice to the lean, muscled vet he takes on as a helper--except that he beats his wife. Ali (Hilmi Sözer) runs a bunch of fast food road joints. Thomas (Benno Fuermann) was dishonorably discharged from service in Afghanistan, is back in his old country home and needs work.The opening scene shows Thomas at a funeral near the town of Jerichow, west of Berlin. A parent has just died and he wants to renovate the country house and live in it. He tries to hide some money from his brother to use for that. He gets caught, and knocked out. This is where Ali comes and asks Thomas to drive for him, because he's drunk.Alienation is a big theme here. Bonds do not exist or if they do, are born of emptiness. Remember Faye Dunnaway's line to Jack Nicolson in Chinatown? "Are you alone?" and his reply: "Isn't everyone?" These folks are shut up in their cold little "windowless monads," to cite a German philosopher. Such also is the cold, ugly world of Forties American noir. Petzold has neatly transposed it to 21st-century Germany. It's what we don't know about Thomas, Ali, and Ali's wife Laura (Nina Hoss) that makes them interesting to us.Petzold tells a simple, effective, highly focused story whose action is held together by the glue of bad behavior and suspicion.Thomas isn't exactly a drifter like the John Garfield character in the 1946 original, but he comes close. The only job he can get is tossing cucumbers into a machine at harvest time. But after the frequently drunk Ali has his driving license revoked, he calls on Thomas to help him full time as driver and co-worker for the deliveries and collections from his roadside snackbars. Laura helps with the accounting, Laura and Thomas immediately meet, and before long they're sneaking kisses and more, with dangerous boldness, almost as if Ali were blind like the cuckolded husband in Nabokov's 'Laughter in the Dark' (which is set in Germany).'Jerichow' doesn't pause for a breath and has no frills or beauty--though the photography has an elegant clarity both in depicting the landscape and painting the light around the three characters. What we get is like a good short story. The spaces become vivid--the runs through heavy rain between houses, the cliff over the water where the victim will come to grief, the space between Laura and Thomas on a bed, the space between Laura's breasts and her thin print dress.Unlike the films of Faith Akim, this isn't from the Turkish-German's point of view, but Ali is not a simple rotter but a man of warmth and vulnerability as well as brutishness. He has lived in Germany since he was two but he remains an outsider. There is also the quality in this theme of feeding his wife's infidelity. He beats her, he cannot satisfy her, she does not like him. But none of that shows. He sees Thomas can handle responsibility and trusts him with runs on his own. It is possible to walk back and forth between the two houses. The three have a picnic on the beach when Ali gets drunk (as usual) and dances. He's angry when Thomas alludes to Zorba--the Greek! The final scene will return to this place. Petzold also has a clever plot device by which for a long period we don't know where Ali is and he may be spying on the illicit couple. Laura, of course, has nasty secrets too.What Petold lacks of the cultural richness of Faith Akin or sleazy atmosphere of Götz Spielmann, he makes up with intensity and menace. Once in a while Forties noir finds a perfect contemporary match and this is such an occasion. Petzold is clearly a director of great understated sureness and accomplishment who deserves to be well known outside his native Germany. Hans Fromm's cinematography is an essential element here, and the performances are fine. Opened in Germany January 9, 2009, scheduled for French release in April. Shown as part of the Film Comment Selects series at Lincoln Center, New York, February-March 2009.