Christian Petzold
10 connections found
Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
The camerawork has the chiaroscuro seediness of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), and for his plot Petzold mines everything from Dark Passage, a 1947 Humphrey Bogart noir about a wrongly accused convict who escapes from prison and undergoes plastic surgery in order to track down his wife’s real killer, to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
In fact, Phoenix is reminiscent of Carol Reed’s The Third Man in its narrative style and its use of music.
It’s a kind of post-war neo-noir with elements of Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair , Carol Reed’s The Third Man , and Hitchcock’s Vertigo — without ever leaning too heavily on any of these, owing to the themes of the story.
Visually and narratively, Phoenix is a pastiche of classic noirs (drawing heavily from The Third Man ), Rubble Films, and 50s melodramas.
The premise behind a myth whose roots go back to classical Greece and which inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is clearly sketched in an efficient script that falters a little only in its over-hasty supernatural denouement.
Via interpretations of the myth by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Tchaikovsky (and other canonical composers), Hans Christian Andersen, Arthur Rackham, and Jean Giraudoux, its diluted onscreen children include Splash (1984), Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989), and Neil Jordan’s Ondine (2009).
In Undine, Petzold turns to the titular mythological character — think a water nymph or Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid more than Disney’s version — who becomes human when she falls in love but is doomed to die if he is unfaithful to her.
Less obvious than TV’s The Handmaid’s Tale, not as visceral as Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, and with definite echoes of Michael Curtiz’ classic Casablanca, Transit is its own creature, by turns heartrending and horrifying.
It's certainly an understandable decision (and a familiar one to anyone who's seen Jack Nicholson in The Passenger), but it leads to a series of lies and deceptions that will have ripple effects on not just him but seemingly everyone he comes into contact with: a deaf and mute North African mother with a sickly young child; the desperate souls waiting in line at the Mexican consulate for their prayers of deliverance to be answered; and the dead author's in-the-dark wife (Paula Beer) who waits in vain for her husband's return.
There’s even a poignant if somewhat protracted interlude featuring “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” star Anamaria Marinca and younger beauty Alicia von Rittberg (“Barbara”), in which Pitt’s character enables the incredulous Norman to lose his virginity: “She’s a good, clean girl.
A shaken Irma (Anamaria Marinca, "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days") is trying to protect her beautiful young niece Emma (Alicia von Rittberg, "Barbara") from enemy soldiers, but Wardaddy sets the stage for domesticity, offering a half dozen eggs.
The two women are an aunt (Anamaria Marinca, star of the great Romanian movie “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”) and her teenage niece (Alicia Von Rittberg, “Barbara”), and they know exactly how precarious their situation is when the Americans arrive in town.
And then there is the extraordinary scene that challenges our notion of what constitutes a “good guy” both onscreen and in real life, in which Collier is shown to be so far gone ethically and morally that he either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that he is being utterly menacing toward two German civilian women (Alicia von Rittberg [ Barbara ] and Anamaria Marinca [ Europa Report ]), and may in fact believe himself to be behaving in a chivalrous way toward them.
One Battle After Another (2025)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
influenced by Transit (2018)
Themes
In watching One Battle After Another, I was reminded of another film that takes an ingenious approach to time: Christian Petzold’s Transit, which is ostensibly “set” during the Second World War. While its protagonists look and feel and dress the part, the rest of Petzold’s vision of fascist Marseille is up-to-date: modern cars, modern appliances, modern weapons.
Even a tryst with her lover Tim (Trystan Pütter, "War Horse," "Phoenix") is cool, a woman outwardly 'having it all' with no real, human connection.
Told in an unrushed manner and utilizing eloquent narration, Transit builds slowly, the horrors off-screen more palpable than any of the ones graphically shown in, say, Mel Gibson’s Hacksaw Ridge.
Perhaps had Petzold's film fully embraced the melodrama of noir it might have worked (in the same way the somewhat comparable The Skin I Live In pulled off its own improbable identity crisis by relaying it with gumption); and, although the leads are characteristically compelling, the subtlety of Hoss and Zehrfeld's performances ill-suits the bold, difficult-to-buy premise, while Kunzendorf is frustratingly sidelined, even though Lene's story is equivalently intriguing.
A kind of cross between Black Book and The Skin I Live In —though nowhere near as outrageous as either— Phoenix stars Petzold’s longtime muse, the great Nina Hoss, as Nelly, a disfigured Holocaust survivor who returns to post-war Berlin after having her face reconstructed by plastic surgery.
Years later, the notorious duo have taken a job with Augsburg's Mayor Engleman (Rainer Bock, "Inglourious Basterds," "Barbara") to solve another crime of kidnapped children.