Film Carew

If The Paperboy's maker, Lee Daniels, has any sense of cinematic style - and, in the face of his repellent schlock, I use the term very loosely - this is it: John Cusack, with a bad haircut and a creepy manner cribbed from the endless ranks of '90s screen serial-killers, is fresh outta prison, and suitably randy; so he takes to a con-fetishising white-trash harlot (Nicole Kidman, seriously) like a rabid dog, the two violently rutting against a clattering washing machine as if on heat. Cue: intercut shots of an alligator knifing through the water, a hog rolling in shit, and blood dripping from an opossum's mouth. The symbolism is hilariously obvious: they're animals! Daniels turned this same trick once before, in an unintentionally-hilarious early moment in his completely contemptible prior picture, Precious, Based On The Novel 'Push' By Sapphire. There, the Bad, Bad Dad of the film's comically-put-upon heroine - dyslexic, morbidly obese, HIV positive, mother to a child with down syndrome, and pregnant with another baby whose baby daddy just happens to be her daddy - is gettin' down to some good ol'-fashioned incestin', and Daniels inserts glimpses of deep-fried chicken and bacon on the grill; turning tropes of blaxploitation into, maybe, whiteguiltsploitation.

Precious is the worst film I've seen this decade, so, y'know, at least it's got that going for it. The Paperboy is just as terribly made, morally flawed, and delusional about its own artistic worth, but it's so utterly ridiculous that the play-actin' celebrity cast seem like they're knowingly making camp trash; so silly that you could barely be bothered hating it. The overstuffed, oversexed plot is a hodge-podge of Southern Gothic, murder-mystery, and nostalgic jerk-off; involving Matthew McConaughey getting fucked in the ass whilst handcuffed and Kidman pissing on Zac Efron's face and Ned Bellamy pulling the intestines out of an alligator and Macy Gray mumbling in a third-wall-breaking voice-over that doesn't actually make any storytelling sense. Gray croaks the word “horny” more times than an '80s T&A teen romp, and in some way this appears to be the film's metier: that horniness is its sustained state; that the entire thing is some lurid, screeching tone-poem out to match Efron's blue-balled-then-wildly-ballin' state.

All this surely makes The Paperboy sound enjoyable; like a faux-noir Showgirls dumped in a Floridian swamp. But true works of camp have a transgressive spirit to them, and this is where Daniels comes up way short. As shown with his work in Precious - and, before that, the utterly idiotic Shadowboxer and the ridiculously racist Monster's Ball - Daniels is both conservative and confused; a moralist who plays with prurience so as to wag his finger at the world. Here, the characters are driven by their libidos: Cusack less concerned with being on death row than having Kidman provide masturbatory fantasies; Kidman using her sexuality to manipulate men, David Oyelowo to advance his career; Efron and McConaughey willingly throwing themselves into self-destructive, dangerous situations due to the desires of their dick. And all of them are punished for it; usually by violence, eventually death. This film is no celebration of sexuality, but a condemnation of it; making this a most American of motion-pitctures, an obvious product of a nation of rising religious fundamentalism whose chief cultural exports are all - as internet fodder, Hollywood blockbuster, or chart-pop video-clips - variations on pornography. And, here, Daniels feels like a guilty masturbator, hurriedly closing his browser window; or, perhaps, like a closeted Republican politician so consumed by shame that they're out to repress gay rights. The Paperboy wheels out the trashy and the tawdry for the audience's pleasures (be they straight-up, guilty, or ironic), only to attempt to alight on a moral high-ground of righteous condemnation. It's a work of essential shame-mongering, but the greatest shame is the fact it exists.

Christian Petzold is rarely mentioned in the circles of great auteurdom; perhaps because his films have a flat direction that speaks to his background in - and periodic returns to - German television; his long takes not quite enough for slow-cinema nerds, his naturalism never an attempt at vérité, his direction always receding into the background. Yet, his quiet, contemplative, engrossing pictures are endlessly rewarding for those appreciative of the cinema of internal moral conflict; those happy to watch as a film's great 'dramas' play in the flickering of an actor's eyes, their self-defeated body language, or their place within a landscape. Petzold often bumps up against genre - Gespenster the psychological study, Yella the corporate thriller, Jerichow the noir, and his newly-released Barbara the escape-from-communist-hell period piece - but only enough to be confusing; his complete disinterest in three-act narratives and standard-issue tropes frustrating to more casual watchers, but fascinating for those attuned to this sensibility. Barbara picks up on various themes familiar to Petzold's work - personal/political ideology as both virtue and vice; past acts of noble sedition causing suffering in the present; desperation for money as tool of liberation, debt as a debilitating burden; the tempestuous of female adolescence diagnosed as mental illness; lives lived in constant transience, footing eternally unsure; the division of Germany a wound, reunification not without scars - but is his clearest, more composed portrait; and his best film since his astonishing 2000 debut, The State I Am In.

Here, Nina Hoss (who'd previously worked with Petzold in Wolfsburg, Yella, and Jerichow) plays a doctor in 1980 East Germany, who's been assigned to a hospital in a rural hamlet as a state punishment; she having dared to apply for an exist visit from East Berlin to join her boyfriend in West Berlin. This makes her, in no uncertain terms, an enemy of the state; and the watching eyes of the Stasi - who come in to perform random cavity searches - are reflected by the watching eyes of the smalltowners; she seeing nothing but suspicion wherever she turns. Even Ronald Zehrfeld's kindly, bearded doctor - who reaches out to Hoss in friendship, and seemingly possesses eternal empathy - is not to be trusted. True to the genre Petzold is loosely working in, our titular heroine carefully, covertly goes about plotting her escape. She does so in quiet routines; the film features lengthy stretches of silence in which the wind eternally blows; the grey drabness of standard cinematic depictions GDR bypasses for a study of nature in deep greens and reds. Like any worthy thriller, shots that initially feel incidental are revealed, later, to carry great meaning; Petzold creating patterns that, incrementally, accrue palpable tension. It's a piece of patient, rewarding filmmaking that, of course, ends with is main character grappling with internal moral conflict.