Phoenix

Phoenix, a German neo-noir released in 2014 is Christian Petzold's sixth film with his muse, actress Nina Hoss.  She's excellent and the film is mildly compelling, but, unfortunately, it's only okay.  Criterion has given this movie its full attention -- the picture looks fantastic, the subtitles are well-translated and instantly legible, and there's a variety of accompanying material on the disc.  But, unless I am missing something, the film is not a masterpiece, but, simply, a rather depressing, if eloquent, melodrama.  Movie-making is so degraded these days by superhero movies and gory horror films that any picture made for adults is likely to seem extraordinary.  Phoenix is certainly a movie for grown-ups with grown-up concerns and a nuanced view of history -- once, these sorts of movies were commonplace:  you can see three of them a day on Turner Classic Movies.  Regrettably, they are now rare and, I think, this leads to a sober, intelligent, but, ultimately, disappointing movie like Phoenix in being overvalued.

Despite its lurid subject matter, everything in Petzold's film is, more or less, tasteful and understated.  An enigmatic woman (she's apparently a Jewish lawyer) drives across a border with another woman who's face is swathed in bloody bandages.  This is Nelly Lenz geboren Wolf, a former Jewish cabaret singer and the sole survivor of a wealthy family that once owned much property in  Berlin.  Lenz has somehow survived Auschwitz, albeit with part of her face shot away.  She has plastic surgery and emerges looking different than she did before her imprisonment in the Camp.  The Jewish lawyer, Lena, urges her to leave Germany with her and travel to Tel Aviv or Haifa -- she has even picked out an apartment for Nelly in what the film calls "Palestine."  Although its not directly stated, there is a strong implication that Lena is in love with Nelly.  Rejecting Lena's pleas, Nelly seeks her Gentile husband, the thuggish Johnny Lenz.  Johnny concealed Nelly successfully until 1944, but rumor has it that he was interrogated and betrayed Nelly with the result that she was shipped to the death camp.  Fallen on hard times, Johnny is bussing tables at a squalid cabaret, Phoenix, in Berlin's American sector.  Nelly finds him there, but he doesn't recognize the emaciated woman with the mutilated face.  She stalks him and, ultimately, Johnny enlists her in a scheme to secure the restoration of Nelly's property seized by the Nazis -- as her surviving husband, he should be entitled to her estate and town home in Berlin.  Remarkably, Johnny chooses Nelly as his accomplice, because he thinks she looks a little like his wife, whom he believes to be dead.  Johnny grooms Nelly to act like the old Nelly, a carefree, elegantly stylish cabaret singer.  Of course, in a very real sense, the old Nelly is dead -- she was destroyed in the Holocaust.  He coaches her on how to walk and talk like Nelly and, even, trains her to write in Nelly's script, something not too difficult because, of course, the fake Nelly is, indeed, the real Nelly, albeit altered by her horrific wartime experiences.  Lena, who we see using a magnifying glass, to study corpses in a mass grave -- she is trying to figure out who has survived the Holocaust -- succumbs to mourning and kills herself.  Johnny has Nelly dress in a red gown and wear her old Parisian shoes to meet the rest of the family at the train station.  Nelly protests that no one returns from the death camps wearing an elegant dress and designer shoes -- "They won't ask about that," Johnny says, accurately predicting the rest of his Gentile family's willingness to simply ignore the past.  The meeting at the train station occurs.  It is just as Johnny predicted.  But Nelly has discovered that two days before she was arrested, Johnny secured a divorce from her.  Apparently, he informed on her.  During the celebratory dinner with Johnny's rather reptilian family, Nelly literally finds her voice:  she sings Kurt Weill's cabaret song "Speak low" (famous for its version by Marlene Dietrich) and Johnny sees the camp tattoo for the first time on her wrist --presumably, he knows, as she sings, that this is, in fact, the real Nelly.  At its climax, the film becomes predictably evasive -- this sort of evasion is known as an "open-ended ending", but is no less evasive for that terminology.  The whole movie has built slowly, and obsessively even, to this moment of revelation -- but Petzold doesn't know how to end the thing and so he just lets Nelly walk away, out of focus as she departs into a bright day. 

The film is maddening because its flaws (in typical Teutonic fashion) can also be argued to be virtues.  For instance, many literal-minded critics argue that there's no possible way that Johnny can't recognize that Nelly, after plastic surgery, is his wife.  But the movie skirts the problem:  Johnny selects Nelly for his Vertigo-like scheme for precisely the reason that she does, in fact, look like his supposedly dead wife -- and has her mannerisms as well.  Similarly, Johnny's blindness, emphasized by a blind street musician who tells Nelly how to find him, is symbolic in a particularly bald and obvious way.  The post-War Germans are willfully blind to what they have done.  Like the audience, they are willing to suspend their disbelief -- of course, they are willing to believe that concentration camp survivors return from the East wearing designer skirts and Parisian shoes.  It's like Shakespeare -- tropes of blindness and misidentification have both literal, as well as symbolic meaning.  Similarly, the evasive ending is probably necessary just because there is no real closure to a story like this -- any conventional ending would be inadequate to the powerful issues raised by the film. (More troubling to me was the mismatch between Nelly and Johnny -- why would a wealthy, well-educated and sophisticated Jewish heiress be married to a common lout like Johnny?  This is never explained and seems profoundly implausible to me.)

Petzold says that he wanted the film to rely upon the Expressionistic cinema in Germany in the late twenties.  This is a misrepresentation fostered by the "anxiety of influence" -- Petzold may or may not believe that his movie is based remotely on the style in Caligari, but, in fact, the film's true influences are far more immediate and obvious:  the picture looks like Fassbinder from beginning to end:  unfortunately, for Petzold the film lacks Fassbinder's wild mise-en-scene and his delirious use of mirrors in confined spaces -- it's like Fassbinder denatured and domesticated.  Fassbinder derived his voluptuous baroque style from Douglas Sirk and, in fact, the movie also looks much like Sirk's technicolor pictures, particularly Written on the Wind in its use of lurid reds and other deeply saturated colors.  The subject matter is similar to issues raised by Fassbinder in so-called BRD (Bundesrepublik Deutschland) Trilogy particularly in the motif of the missing person returning from the East  as in, for instance, The Marriage of Maria Braun.  Nina Hoss gives a bold and courageous performance -- in her acting, we do, in fact, see traces of the Expressionistic cinema:  throughout much of the movie, she staggers around like a revenant, a zombie, one of the living dead.  Closely considered, the plot doesn't make sense.  If Johnny is divorced from Nelly what right does he have to her property anyhow?-- accordingly, the very plot twist that establishes that Johnny has betrayed Nelly, also should render the whole narrative moot:  he has no legal basis to participate in her property due to the divorce decree.  Ultimately, I question the film's entire enterprise -- the picture is essentially a garish, trashy melodrama, a less obsessive and swoony version of Hitchcock's Vertigo.  But Vertigo didn't rely for its plot points on the Holocaust and I have a very slight sense of queasiness at using the mass murder of the Jews (which Petzold in his commentary piously calls "The Shoah") as a basis for a tawdry crime melodrama. 

Petzold notes that he shot the film in lustrous Cinemascope just before the Arri laboratory in Germany closed down.  This is probably one of the last, if not the last, film made on actual celluloid in Germany.