Germany near zero The films of Christian Petzold at the HFA BY PETER KEOUGH
	"The Films of Christian Petzold" At the Harvard Film Archive September 17 through 19.

German films seem to succeed only when they’re fraught with stereotypical Teutonic obsessions: darkness, angst, apocalypse. Expressionism and the New German Cinema of the ’70s thrived on them. Directors like Dorris Dörrie and Tom Tykwer who have tried to diversify into screwball comedy or Tarantino-esque slickness have met with limited success.

Christian Petzold, a young director nurtured by television and bolstered by the festival circuit, draws on the old grim German verities again, framing them in an austere, postmodernist landscape that renders them if anything more claustrophobic and unnerving. Neither has the Germany of pictures changed much since the days of Rainer Werner Fassbinder or, for that matter, Doktor Caligari. It is a land of social and economic inequity, of seething rage, despair, and longing, of weak men and wronged women who dream of twisted revenge and deluded escape.

Tom (Richy Müller) and Tina (Catherine Flemming) in Cuba Libre (1995; September 17 at 9 p.m.) dreamed of escaping to the socialist paradise of the title. Tom made it as far as Vera Cruz only after robbing Tina of her money, leaving her bereft, and continuing on alone. Now both are homeless, one step from extinction, until Jimmy (Wolfram Berger) saves Tom from the gutter. A shady character with a heart problem (a fusion of sorts of the Dennis Hopper and Bruno Ganz characters in Wenders’s Der Amerikanische Freund), Jimmy wants Tom as his "friend." His motives are murky, but he offers Tom money, a makeover, and the key to a locker containing a fortune. Tom goes along because his unwholesomely gratifying guilt compels him to repay Tina. Tina, meanwhile, exults in her new-found wealth, power, and revenge. And love? Maybe it lies with the two bums in the flophouse who discuss in exquisite detail their lost, imagined fortunes.

Brazil is the land of new beginnings for the fugitives in Die innere Sicherheit/The State I Am In (2000; September 18 at 9 p.m.), and again a robbery turns the dream into a nightmare. Hans (Richy Müller) and Clara (Barbara Auer) cannot go to the police when thugs steal their savings at a coastal resort in Portugal because they themselves are on the lam from the German authorities for unspecified terrorist activities. Their teenage daughter, Jeanne (Julia Hummer), is weary of the run-around; she wants to shop at the mall and have a boyfriend. When she falls in love and asserts her identity, she re-enacts a mating dance already familiar in Petzold’s films (and in Fassbinder’s, too) of selflessness, betrayal, and self-destruction.

Guilt and revenge return in Toter Mann/Something To Remind Me (2001; September 18 at 7 p.m. and September 19 at 9 p.m.), and they’re indistinguishable from desire and reconciliation. A shy defense lawyer (André Hennicke) falls for a mysterious woman (Nina Hoss) who disappears — with his lap-top containing files on all his cases. The vertiginous obsession that follows disrupts his work with clients, including that of Blum (Sven Pippig), a meek convict seeking parole after serving 14 years for an unspecified crime. The two plot lines converge, but there’s such reliance on genre conventions, it’s almost disappointing. More rewarding are the scenes of starkly detailed anomie and the flattened images of alienation and pathos.

Wolfsburg (2002; September 17 and September 19 at 7 p.m.) unfolds like an inversion of Mann and of Cuba Libre. Philipp (Benno Fürmann) makes it to Cuba all right, traveling there with his fiancée, Katja (Antje Westermann), near the beginning of the film. But it’s a vain attempt to escape guilt. Distracted by an argument with Katja on the phone while driving, he runs down a boy on a bicycle and flees the scene. Later, he tries to confess — to the police, to the boy’s mother Laura (Nina Hoss) at the hospital, to Katja. But something always interrupts: another call, a misunderstanding, his own cowardice.

As is often the case in Petzold’s films, the disconsolate victim and the tormented perpetrator draw together in a perverse romantic relationship; here the director limns it with masterful, excruciating economy and inevitability, evoking at times the understated tautness of Hitchcock. (Not to mention a weakness for MacGuffins; Petzold’s penchant for plot devices like a forgotten shoe or a discarded red fender is both a weakness and a strength.) In Wolfsburg, Petzold presents his most accomplished picture of the German state of things. In Thomas Wolfe’s America, you can never go home again; in Petzold’s Germany, you can never escape.