SpoilerShow
To run with the black boxed conversation from earlier I think all of this particularly the gun works better when the film is seen as a metaphor. I'm completely unfamiliar with Petzold so I'm coming into this as a fan of Farocki's work which pays off in spades. From the Lang speech going forward it is clear that this film is connected to his ideas of a political video ethnography with the film at large being a metaphor for Jewish recovery from the Holocaust without Israel. That's a hard microcosm to pull off and if anything the script emphasizes this in speech a little much in the first act especially with the friend (with the suspiciously similar name). This makes the film about the larger issue of Jewish vengeance as represented by the chekhovian gun versus the liberation the liberation of self acceptance against the cries for assimilation as represented by the ending we do get. In a way it is an anti-Inglourious Basterds and all the better for it with Hoss providing the more real face of diaspora Jews at the end of the war. That of course means there's a lot more meaning packed into things such as the Zionist friend or the use of Dark Passage than I'm bothering to talk about right now. I figure since this is a rather reasonable bone on the surface of matters to pick with the film I'd give my half cent.
