Ghosts

German director Christian Petzold brings to the screen another set of his characters destined to connect only temporarily if at all with each other and only incidentally with the audience. A teenage girl (Julia Hummer) on the drift between foster homes befriends a twenty-something vagabond (Sabine Timoteo) of no apparent address, who gets into scrapes with strange men in the park and seems to live on handouts, shoplifting and whatever she can steal. The friendship blossoms into a kind of romance, while a woman guest at the Berlin Marriott, outfitted in Prada (Marianne Basler), comes to believe that the teenager is her daughter who disappeared 15 years ago outside a supermarket. Like the more recent film "Jerichow," there develops a degree of rough tension between the three central characters, which is resolved in a way not happily for any of them.The "Ghosts" ("Gespenter") of the title refers to a series of computerized image projections based on a baby photo of what a grown child could look like. All the characters we meet (there are others) are in some way ghosts of the fully realized people they might be were they somehow not users of other people, liars, thieves, manipulators, voyeurs, emotionally crippled, passive aggressive, or simply passive. Petzold's portrayals of the life he sees being lived are hardly reassuring. As social animals, his characters can be more animal than social, and the city they prowl through is lifeless and often colorless. A wash of rich color makes a stark contrast in what is supposed to be a party scene, but it's not a party where anyone seems to be having any fun.This is not a film for everyone, but if you like a story that unfolds slowly and deliberately, with unexpected turns that reveal character and their motivations like pieces of a puzzle, Petzold does not disappoint. The DVD includes a making of documentary in which you get to see him at work.