Phoenix

Nina Hoss

Christian Petzold's Phoenix fills me with excitement that I may be coming in at the end of a great collaboration. Petzold and Nina Hoss have gained a steady crescendo of acclaim as the new Fassbinder and Schygulla or Sternberg and Dietrich. Phoenix lives up to its billing and how, as Petzold leaves the final turn of the screw of this quiet thriller in the capable hands of his lead actress.

Hoss plays a holocaust survivor who took a bullet to the head and, after surgery, looks nothing like her former self. She returns to Berlin to seek out her husband, who may have betrayed her to the Nazis. Her husband, thinking his wife and her extended family dead, recruits Hoss to impersonate herself  so they can split her inheritance. The film is a self-reflexive delight, a study of acting and impersonation that boasts some of the finest performances in recent memory.

Petzold is asking us to suspend our disbelief, the plot has many improbabilities, in order to portray the legacy of Nazism in the collective German memory and in film itself. When Hoss' bandaged character walks shakily outside her hospital, the ghost of Eyes Without a Face is not far. When the character has metamorphosed and walks chicly to the titular nightclub where she will first see her husband in her new guise, her veiled figure conjures the spirits of Pabst, Lang, Wilder and Fassbinder. Petzold presents love and beauty as fleeting, but understands their power to overwhelm our senses. 

It is the sound of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash's Speak Low, a love song of quiet power, that ultimately punctures one character's illusions at the climax of Phoenix. That Petzold uses one of my favorite songs as a repeated motif may make me more susceptible than most to the film's denouement, but I have no qualms about recommending Phoenix unreservedly. A treat for the mind and eye. (9/24/16)