CHRISTIAN PETZOLD’S PHOENIX
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD’S Phoenix is cool, clean, knowing, full of references to other movies—a stylish, belated film noir that invokes a lot more darkness than it can cope with or even acknowledge. It is based on a French novel by Hubert Monteilhet that became an English film directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Maximilian Schell and Ingrid Thulin. The book and its adaptation were called, respectively, Le retour des cendres (1961) and Return from the Ashes (1965).
In the new film, the Phoenix is a nightclub in rubble-strewn postwar Berlin. Has Germany been born again from the ashes? Well, some people have survived, through luck or wit or lack of scruples. The club itself looks as if it were trying to be the ashes, with seedy performers imitating imitations of the world of Cabaret.
One of the people who have survived—ashes and worse, in her case—is Nelly (Nina Hoss), a Jew who emerged from Auschwitz badly disfigured. A plastic surgeon offers to give her a new face and proposes copies of a couple of famous film stars. When she forlornly says she wants to look the way she did before, we know she is a loser. How closely does the operation recompose her old self? Nelly has her doubts, and asks her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) if she would recognize her. Lene’s yes is not altogether convincing. In response, Nelly points to a photograph and says, “That’s me.”
Smashed faces can’t be the same again, and perhaps broken identities can’t be healed. But this film is not going to stay with such tame stuff—it has to get its tricky plot going. Driving Nelly’s will to survive is her hope of seeing her husband, Johnny, again, and sure enough she finds him straightaway. He was a pianist and she was a singer; now he’s busing dishes at the Phoenix. He doesn’t recognize her, and she (going by the name Esther) doesn’t let on who she is. She doesn’t know, or won’t believe, he betrayed her to the Nazis.
But Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) does see a certain resemblance, and if Hitchcock’s Vertigo were not still thirteen years or so from being made, we might think its plot had given him an idea. He will coach this unknown woman so that she can impersonate his wife, and together they will claim the fortune she stands to inherit from her relatives who were, together with their direct heirs, exterminated in the camps. “Alive she was poor,” he says in one of his grand, cruel lines; “dead she has money.” He buys Nelly a red dress, gives her a pair of her own old shoes. When she says people coming from the camps don’t look like that, he says no one wants to see what people really look like, only to see how happy they are to be back in the world. He turns out to be right.
This is a strong comment on a familiar German reaction to the war and its collateral histories, and obviously we are not meant to approve of Johnny. But his game turns out to be the only one in the movie. Nelly abjectly submits to it, and Johnny is so proud of it that he never considers the chance that Esther might be Nelly, even when the shoes fit perfectly and the two women’s handwriting matches. Lene’s persuasive but linear presentation of the person who can’t forgive her enemies offers another angle (she is an ardent Zionist), but she can’t live with her own harsh thoughts—or the loss of Nelly to Johnny—and commits suicide.
The ending is better than any of this promises, and culminates with Nelly singing Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low” to Johnny’s accompaniment. At first she talks the lines; she could be anyone. On the second verse, she starts to sing. Even then Johnny doesn’t recognize her until he sees the tattooed number on her wrist. He stops playing, stares at her. She sings the song to the end, then leaves, and the film is over.
A damaged woman can’t give up on the idea of her old love; a man who has sent his wife to death can’t allow the thought of her being alive to come anywhere near his mind. That is all she is; that is all he is. The borrowing of a difficult German history as a setting for this tale might not feel so cheap if the movie had sought some kind of connection with that history, tried to use its tale to invite us to an understanding of a traumatic moment. But perhaps the story is meant to comment on the options for historical memory: We can blankly suffer; we can try to profit from everyone else’s stupidity and cowardice; we can wish for justice but prefer our own death. These are real options, but far from the only ones. They are grimly schematic, and it is notable that the only purposeful and active figure here, even if he does get everything wrong, is not Jewish and is a crook.
Christian Petzold’s Phoenix opens July 24 at the IFC Center in New York.
Michael Wood is the author, most recently, of Alfred Hitchcock: The Man Who Knew Too Much (New Harvest, 2015).
