Phoenix (2014; dir. Christian Petzold)
In Christian Petzold's Phoenix (2014), a Holocaust survivor, unrecognizable after reconstructive surgery, is recruited by her unknowing husband to impersonate herself so he can claim her inheritance. You can tell by the plot why Phoenix is being called film noir, but the classification doesn't seem quite right to me. Partly this is because of the minimalism and naturalism of the presentation: as the protagonist, Nina Hoss gives an extraordinary, understated performance, full of silences and restraint, which director Petzold wisely emphasizes with alienated distant shots of minimal movements and a mostly unscored soundtrack. But mostly the film feels like something other than noir because, while there is sometimes physical danger for a lone woman in the streets of post-war Berlin, what drives the story isn't suspense, but dread: the dread of people who refuse to know what they already know. They aren't haunted by ghosts of their pasts; they're ghosts, haunted by their former selves.
Former lounge singer Nelly (Nina Hoss) pretends with her husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), not so much to find out if he betrayed her to the Nazis, but to enter a dream where she can become again the woman she once was, in the world that once existed. When Nelly asks to visit her former home, her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) tries to tell her she can't go back: "It was bombed out. It no longer exists." Nelly insists, and picks her way through the uncleared ruins of her apartment building until she catches sight of her new reflection in the broken shards of a mirror: "I no longer exist," she tells Lene, and later: "I want to be Nelly again."
Because she is not the person she was: what makes it possible for Johnny to see Nelly as a woman who resembles his wife, rather than his wife herself, is not simply her changed face, but her changed presence, her haunted, hungry eyes, and the changed way she moves, with the careful, stiff movements of someone who has survived great trauma and great illness. In one chilling scene, when Nelly seeks out Johnny at a night club, a soldier crowds her against the wall and caresses her; she is pliant, doll-like, in the moment not afraid of him, or even numb, but entirely elsewhere; her face dreamy, her gaze fixed on Johnny busing dishes across the room.
Johnny wants to reconstruct Nelly's former self, not simply training her in movement and knowledge, but buying her a red dress, fancy shoes, asking her to dye her hair, re-create the make-up she wore in an old poster. "You think anyone leaves the camps like that?" she asks, shaking. "Nobody will buy it." They'll believe it because they want to, Johnny tells her. "You've seen the returnees. . . . No one looks at them. Everyone avoids them." Johnny is so devoted to not looking that he refuses to recognize that the woman he's speaking to is a survivor; she'll have to burn her forearm, he tells her, to hide that she doesn't have the numbers tattooed there from Auschwitz.
Spoilers
No one can bear to look back, but no one can look away. Nelly's friend Lene, full of controlled rage, urges Nelly to come with her to Palestine, to look to the future instead of the past. Lene cannot stand to listen to German songs anymore; she is furious at the Jews who are considering staying in Germany, who are willing to forgive. But Lene's drive is deceptive: Lene kills herself because, she says in her suicide note, there is no way forward for her. "I feel more drawn to our dead than to our living." She kills herself when Nelly is away with Johnny; Nelly has been never been present for her.
It's hard to describe the feel of the movie, which at 98 minutes is simultaneously roomy and economical: every scene is given time to unfold, to include more silence than speech; every moment feels precisely chosen, with nothing unnecessary included and nothing necessary excluded. The film ends, inevitably, on silence, exactly where it needs to.
Available on Netflix streaming.
cups brewed at DW
Former lounge singer Nelly (Nina Hoss) pretends with her husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), not so much to find out if he betrayed her to the Nazis, but to enter a dream where she can become again the woman she once was, in the world that once existed. When Nelly asks to visit her former home, her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) tries to tell her she can't go back: "It was bombed out. It no longer exists." Nelly insists, and picks her way through the uncleared ruins of her apartment building until she catches sight of her new reflection in the broken shards of a mirror: "I no longer exist," she tells Lene, and later: "I want to be Nelly again."
Because she is not the person she was: what makes it possible for Johnny to see Nelly as a woman who resembles his wife, rather than his wife herself, is not simply her changed face, but her changed presence, her haunted, hungry eyes, and the changed way she moves, with the careful, stiff movements of someone who has survived great trauma and great illness. In one chilling scene, when Nelly seeks out Johnny at a night club, a soldier crowds her against the wall and caresses her; she is pliant, doll-like, in the moment not afraid of him, or even numb, but entirely elsewhere; her face dreamy, her gaze fixed on Johnny busing dishes across the room.
Johnny wants to reconstruct Nelly's former self, not simply training her in movement and knowledge, but buying her a red dress, fancy shoes, asking her to dye her hair, re-create the make-up she wore in an old poster. "You think anyone leaves the camps like that?" she asks, shaking. "Nobody will buy it." They'll believe it because they want to, Johnny tells her. "You've seen the returnees. . . . No one looks at them. Everyone avoids them." Johnny is so devoted to not looking that he refuses to recognize that the woman he's speaking to is a survivor; she'll have to burn her forearm, he tells her, to hide that she doesn't have the numbers tattooed there from Auschwitz.
Spoilers
No one can bear to look back, but no one can look away. Nelly's friend Lene, full of controlled rage, urges Nelly to come with her to Palestine, to look to the future instead of the past. Lene cannot stand to listen to German songs anymore; she is furious at the Jews who are considering staying in Germany, who are willing to forgive. But Lene's drive is deceptive: Lene kills herself because, she says in her suicide note, there is no way forward for her. "I feel more drawn to our dead than to our living." She kills herself when Nelly is away with Johnny; Nelly has been never been present for her.
It's hard to describe the feel of the movie, which at 98 minutes is simultaneously roomy and economical: every scene is given time to unfold, to include more silence than speech; every moment feels precisely chosen, with nothing unnecessary included and nothing necessary excluded. The film ends, inevitably, on silence, exactly where it needs to.
Available on Netflix streaming.
cups brewed at DW