While many of the films of the “Berlin School” remain focused on families and small social groups as microcosms of contemporary life, Hochhäusler’s latest feature takes place among the hyper-mobile elites of international finance. The plot of The City Below pivots on a love triangle driven by a banking executive, after his chance meeting with the wife of a junior colleague. Without his lover’s knowledge, he engineers the transfer of her husband to a potentially dangerous post in Indonesia. The film’s mise en scene juxtaposes the disorienting glassiness of corporate architecture with chilly domestic spaces and the dark recesses of illicit desire to illustrate a world dominated by global flows of capital in which the only value is exchange value. – DP