"You can't love if you don't have money," Laura (Nina Hoss) tells Thomas (Benno Fürmann), the ex-solider who's been hired as a driver for her husband's semi-lucrative snack car empire in the former East Germany. The husband, Ali (Hilmi Sözer), is a Turk living uncomfortably in Germany, painfully aware that even his limited social stature-including his marriage-is provisional, tentatively bought and paid for. This spare, icy thriller transposes the desert tryst of James M. Cain's THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, an equally desolate locale with unforgettable results.

In German with English subtitles