Movie review: Phoenix a post-Nazi drama of identity

German actress Nina Hoss gives a fascinating performance as a woman who returns from a death camp to find her true love — and her own persona, writes Jay Stone

 

Phoenix

Starring: Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld

Directed by: Christian Petzold

3.5/5

Running time: 98 minutes

(In German with English subtitles)

By Jay Stone

The phoenix in Phoenix is a nightclub in the American sector of Berlin in the late 1940s — a post-war Cabaret of boozy celebration and corrupted licentiousness, tainted by the same Nazi subtext — and also the mythic bird that has risen from the ashes. In this case, it’s a songbird: Nelly (Nina Hoss), a Jewish chanteuse who has just been released from a concentration camp, her face covered in bloody bandages. She has been shot in the face, but somehow survived.

“They thought you were dead,” says a doctor. “You’re lucky.”

The doctor is going to reconstruct her appearance (“a new face is an advantage,” he says with the matter-of-fact pragmatism of a nation rethinking its past). Then she and her rescuer, the aid worker Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) will go to the new land of Palestine to live in an apartment by the sea.

But Nelly can’t leave, not just yet. She is looking for her husband Johnny, a piano player to whom she is so devoted that his memory kept her alive in the nightmare of Auschwitz. Lene suspects Johnny is the one who betrayed Nelly to the Nazis — she comes from a rich family, and there is still money to be claimed in Switzerland — but Nelly staggers down the ruined streets of rubble and bombed-out houses to the Phoenix. Maybe Johnny is working there.

He turns out to be a rough-hewn waiter (Ronald Zehrfeld) with the look of a young Hemingway and the coarse manners of a man who has survived the war through sheer aggression. He sees her, and before she can say who she is, he has an idea. This scarred woman reminds him of someone: somewhere in her reconstructed face, he sees Nelly, the wife he knows must be dead. Maybe if he can tutor her, he can persuade everyone that she is his wife, returned from the camps. Then they can split her money.

Thus Phoenix takes on some of the aspects of Vertigo, Hitchcock’s dark inquiry into obsession and identity, although with the added layers of the damage the Holocaust did on both sides of the barbed wire. Director Christian Petzold’s previous movie Barbara (also starring Hoss and Zehrfeld) was a love story set in the paranoia of a divided post-war Germany; Phoenix is a less urgent film but one with a deeper historic resonance. Like Vertigo, it counts on an audience to cast aside its notions of plausibility in service of a greater cause, the question of who we are and how we are made, and how those things are changed by disaster.

Based on a novel by Hubert Monteilhet, Phoenix rests on a fascinating performance by Hoss, who must play several things at once: a survivor, a woman in love, and a woman pretending to be her own double. Johnny trains Nelly in how to dress — at one stage, she has to try on her own shoes, like some tragic Cinderella — and how to react to him. We watch her watching him, learning how he saw the real Nelly by listening to how he is re-creating the woman for this impostor.
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There is a feeling of film noir to all this — long shadows cast on the Berlin ruins as Nelly races to and from the nightclub — and a haunting score. The Kurt Weill song Speak Low (“too soon, too soon”) opens and closes the movie. Like history, it repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as something even worse. And like Phoenix, it stays with you long after the movie ends.

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3.5Score

Phoenix: In this German film, a former singer (the magnificent Nina Hoss) returns from a Nazi concentration camp to find her husband, who think she's just a lookalike who can help him steal her fortune. it's a dark drama of identity with many historical layers, even if the plot is somewhat improbable. 3 1/2 stars out of 5 _ Jay Stone

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