Phoenix
|  Christian Petzold’s Phoenix begins with a border crossing, which is all too appropriate because it is a film about the tenuous, ever shifting nature of borders, especially the ones between past and present. In the opening moments, a woman whose face is wrapped entirely in white, blood-stained bandages is driven from Switzerland into Germany by her friend. The setting is shortly after the end of World War II, and we will soon learn that the woman in bandages, Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss), is a Jewish-German cabaret singer who survived Auschwitz and is now returning to her home in Berlin. Her face, which was seriously disfigured by a gunshot that was meant to kill her, requires extensive plastic surgery, and even though she asks to look like she did before, the final result is decidedly alien, which fits Nelly’s new, isolated post-war existence. Her entire family is dead and his husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld ), a gentile pianist who may or may not have betrayed her to the Nazis to save his own neck, is nowhere to be found. Nelly is a stranger in a strange land—referring to both the rubble-strewn ruins of Berlin and her own body—which makes Phoenix a fascinating psycho-social study in internal and national alienation.Nelly’s friend, Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), is also a Jew, although she escaped Germany and rode out the war from the relative safety of London. Lene is intent on leaving Germany and moving to Haifa, Palestine, where Jewish émigrés have been promised land as part of the development of a new Jewish state. Lene’s inclination is toward both self- and cultural preservation, but Nelly, stranded in her own dislocation, wants to reach back into the past and reclaim some element of her pre-war life, which necessarily entails tracking down Johnny. Lene warns her, telling Nelly that Johnny turned her over to the Nazis, and she later reveals that he secretly divorced her as she was being carted away to a concentration camp. But, Nelly is either disbelieving or simply doesn’t care. She is drawn, like a moth to flame, to Johnny, whom she finds working in a small nightclub called The Phoenix that is barely visible from behind the rubble. And here is where the story gets tricky: Johnny does not recognize Nelly with her new face, although he senses something about her that reminds him of his supposedly late wife, which is why he draws her into a scheme in which she will pretend to be Nelly so that they can claim her inheritance together. Thus, Nelly is doubly rejected by her husband, first in his betrayal of her when she was taken by the Nazis and second in his failure to recognize her and then use her to get at her family’s money. While it is never made absolutely clear whether Johnny turned her over to the Nazis, his behavior toward her and the shamelessness of his plan to profit from her supposed death tells us quite a bit about him. However, befitting the film’s multiple layers of psychological complexity, Ronald Zehrfeld plays Johnny with hints of pathetic desperation that makes him, if not fully sympathetic, at least understandable on some level. Johnny may have survived the war and avoided its more abject horrors, but we get the sense that he is a shell of his former self. Ironically, he and Nelly are both survivors who share a sense of profound alienation borne of her victimization and his collaboration with her victimizers. Phoenix bears more than a few traces of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterful Vertigo (1958), although it plays exclusively through the perspective of the woman who knows she is being used by a desperate, pathetic man and allows it. In Vertigo, Kim Novak’s Judy allows James Stewart’s Scotty to sadistically make her over into the woman she pretended to be in the first half of the film because she had fallen in love with him. Phoenix, which was adapted by Petzold and his regular collaborator Harun Farocki from the novel Le retour des cendres by Hubert Monteilhet, complicates that dynamic by leaving Nelly’s motivation vague for most of the film. Is she seeking revenge on Johnny? Is she still in love with him and, like Judy, is willing to masochistically subvert herself to his plans just to be with him? Is she somehow testing him to determine if he did, in fact, betray her? Or is she so psychologically damaged by her wartime experience and loss of visage that she just wants to cling to anything that connects her to her prewar identity? Those questions swirl and churn beneath the narrative’s gradually intensifying surface, giving it a fascinatingly enigmatic quality that draws us constantly in, even as we recognize on some level the fundamental absurdity of the premise. As Nelly, Nina Hoss (in her sixth collaboration with Petzold) gives an astounding performance of layered subtlety that keeps her character both sympathetic and mysterious. Small gestures, flicks of her eyes, and barely perceptible twitches of her mouth convey not any absolute sense of what she’s thinking or feeling, but rather the terrible layers of experience with which she’s dealing, as past and present collide in both reality and performance. She is playing a woman playing a woman who she used to be, and the more she pretends to be prewar Nelly, the farther she moves from ever being able to reclaim that identity. It’s a shrewd, engaging play of psychological dexterity that, despite its melodramatic roots, never feels arch or forced, which is what makes the film’s final moments so utterly compelling and satisfying, even as it leaves us with a new host of unanswered questions.
Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Sundance Selects / The Criterion Collection | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overall Rating: 
(3.5)
