The City Below
(Unter dir die Stadt)
With Nicolette Krebitz, Robert Hunger-Bühler, Mark Waschke.
Germany, 2010, 35mm, color, 110 min.
German with English subtitles.
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