Nina Hoss

Tár

by
Lydia Tár on the podium

Tár, not Tar – even in the title of this drama about a world-famous conductor’s epic fall from grace there are hints as to what exactly caused it. Writer/director Todd Field, in his first film since 2006’s Little Children, structures this grand return like a symphony, with a big opening statement à la Mahler’s Fifth, introducing conductor extraordinaire Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) on stage in conversation with Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker. This is the full data-dump of personality – a glamorous, garrulous, driven, intellectual, unapologetic, combative internationally feted conductor at the top of her game. Tár’s self-satisfaction is almost unbearable to watch. After that a series of sketches dip slightly behind the … Read more

Summer Window

by
August and Juliane

When not co-creating, -writing and -directing the glorious Babylon Berlin TV series, Henk Handloegten likes to make films like Summer Window (Fenster zum Sommer), dramas that come front-loaded with a chunk of fantasy. The fantasy isn’t what his films are about, it’s more of a come-on, luring in the sceptical, who might find that they’ve lingered longer with his style of humane drama than they expected. In Good Bye Lenin!, which Handloegten co-wrote, the fantasy was more oblique, existing only in the mind of its East German characters, who were playing a gigantic game of make-believe with their frail mother, recently awake after a coma, in which the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen and … Read more

Barbara

by
Barbara on her bicycle

By the time Christian Petzold made Barbara in 2012, enough time had passed for his film not to be seen as just the latest in a line of Ostalgia movies (2003’s Good Bye Lenin! is a prime example). In any case the German writer and director tends to be more concerned with the problems created by freedom rather than a lack of it. Films misty-eyed for the communist era aren’t really his thing. However, Barbara does have some generous things to say about life in the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) wrapped up in a thriller about a woman trying to escape to the West. Barbara (Nina Hoss) is a doctor in … Read more

Wolfsburg

by
Benno Fürmann and Nina Hoss

Wolfsburg. The title is a bit of a joke, a reference to the city/state in Germany where Volkswagen is headquartered. The fact that there’s not a single VW in the film suggesting that either the lawyers prevailed or writer/director Christian Petzold decided he’d said enough already with his automotively flavoured title. Because the film is about a car salesman (Benno Fürmann) out on the open road who, while fishing around for his phone on the floor of his classic NSU Ro 80, knocks a boy off his bicycle. Philipp doesn’t pull over to see if the inert figure is OK, partly because he’s in shock, partly because he’s a coward. Though by the … Read more

Something to Remind Me

by
Nina Hoss and André Hennicke

It’s called Toter Mann in German, the literal translation of which is Dead Man, but instead the distributors went with the possibly even more ironic Something to Remind Me for the English-language release of this mystery thriller, the first collaboration between writer/director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss. A TV movie is how it was described in 2001 when it aired in Germany, but these days that fairly nonsensical distinction has dropped away – it’s a movie, and a highly cinematic one at that. It hasn’t got the budget of the big screen movie but the thriller genre fits the bill, as does the atmosphere, sleek and chilly. Petzold, so the story goes, … Read more

Jerichow

by
Benno Fürmann, Nina Hoss and Hilmi Sözer

Jerichow is the fourth collaboration between director Christian Petzold and actor Nina Hoss – both names a guarantee of at least a degree of excellence. But before we get there – just quickly skimming through Petzold’s entries on the IMDB (research!) to see which films actually comprise the somewhat disputed “ghost trilogy” (Petzold and Hoss’s first three collaborations), I noticed that someone has added notes to a number of Petzold’s films, under the Trivia section. How closely one film resembles Hitchcock’s Vertigo, another Claude Chabrol’s Que la Bête Meure, yet another Sidney Lumet’s Running On Empty, and so on. And how in all of these cases there is no reference back to the … Read more