The recent appearance in local theaters of Christian Petzold‘s 2014 Phoenix is a timely reminder of a fine and under appreciated German film maker. Movies for adults is how I think of his work. Not in the naughty sense. Just the opposite. When sexuality is involved in his stories of people, as it usually is, it’s always as part of a larger emotional portrait, seldom exploitative and not following the usual arc of barely disguised puritanism in contemporary movies – forbidden passion – explosive exaltation – deserved disaster. Petzold’s people are always participants, or pawns, in larger social and economic tectonics.
Phoenix starts with a harrowing car trip through an American checkpoint at the post WW II East-West German border. One of the passengers, Nelly Lenz [Nina Hoss], just released from Auschwitz, is in terrible shape, her face swathed in bandages. Plastic surgery restores a face, but not her original face. [Yes, shades of Bogart in Dark Passage.] Ignoring the warnings of the friend who brought her to Berline, she sets out with her new face to find her husband Johnny [Ronald Zehrfeld], whose memory kept her alive in the camp,
She finds him but he does not recognize her. She is just another woman who shows up at the seedy G.I. bar, The Phoenix, where he works. A vague familiarity, though gets him thinking. Perhaps he can use this stranger to convince the authorities that his wife has returned, and so reclaim what was taken from a presumably dead woman. She agrees, with a kind of stupefied belief that this pretense will make him see her, as who she is, and that life can return to what it was before the Holocaust. He sets out to shape her to his liking even as she begins to reveal herself, hoping he will recognize her. If he sometimes suspects he cannot allow himself to follow the clues, as it was he who betrayed her to the Nazis.
Both put on absolutely mesmerizing performances, with strong echoes of Hitchcock’s famous Vertigo in which Jimmy Stewart as Scottie tries to remake Judy into Madeline who was in fact Judy impersonating Madeline. Deep questions of identity, its loss and its construction, of wanting to forget, of needing to remember, stretch taut right through Phoenix, snapping to an almost perfect ending of final discovery.
Hoss’s striking beauty (see earlier films) is entirely re-worked here. She is haggard, consumed by a terrible past and staggered by the future unfolding. For a very interesting interview with Petzold about the film, see here –though perhaps not until you’ve seen it!
Phoenix was preceded by Barbara (2012) with Hoss and Zehrfeld taking the leads as well. The Association of German Film Critics named it best feature film of that year. Hoss, as Dr. Barbara Wolff, an East German doctor, plays a woman of quiet, drawn-in strength much as Nelly, with a less desperate past but one from which she also has hopes love will lift her. Zehrfeld, as André, is also a doctor. He is more tender and attentive than his Johnny in Phoenix. We like him, with one concern. They meet as Barbara arrives at his rural clinic, sent from her post at a top East Berlin hospital as punishment for requesting an exit visa to be with her West German fiancee. The Stasi keeps an eye on her during her exile, and it turns out has André in their pay. As the two show their devotion to patients and good medicine their initially frosty relationship warms. She has a brief encounter with her lover, who declares he will come and live with her in the East. Plans continue to get her out. She receives and hides money for a small-boat crossing to Norway. Risk and fear rise: who is watching? Who knows? Will she get out? In the end, however, love shows itself in different dress, a surprise, as it often does.
Petzold, as always, uses a subdued hand. No histrionics, in script, acting, camera work or musical score. Austere, but gripping. Small gestures mean much. Close ups of her face, spare dialog make her a person who doesn’t attract so much as impress herself upon us.
The story told in Jerichow (2008) may ring a few bells of familiarity with American audiences, retelling as it were, James M. Cain’s 1934 crime thriller, The Postman Always Rings Twice, which had two popular U.S. productions, Tay Garnett in 1946 with the smoldering Lana Turner and lady’s man John Garfield, in the leads and Bob Rafelson in 1981 with Jessica Lange and Jack Nicholson, both very hot properties.
Petzold’s favorite muse, Nina Hoss, plays Laura, the younger wife to Turkish born, East German raised Ali Özkan [Hilmi Sözer.] Benno Fürmann is Thomas, the hunky drifter. The story is moved beyond the sex and murder thriller of the originals. Thomas, with an obscure past involving time fighting in Afghanistan, shows himself to be a pretty decent fellow, pulling Ali’s car from a drunken lake-dive and covering up to the police. He resists (slightly anyway) Laura’s passionate advances. Ali is more than the distasteful foreigner of original conception. He has made a decent living for himself running a chain of snack bars — to help with which Thomas is hired. Though clearly older than his wife and not a match in the looks department he has some tenderness for her; also some jealous ugliness. He had rescued her from a debt related prison sentence and they work together in the business. For whatever she owes him, she wants to get away even before Thomas shows up. In a pivotal moment she reveals she has been cheating on him, “but not in the way you thought.”
In Jerichow, the adult nature of Petzold’s take on the human comedy is most clear. We don’t have story told simply for the shock value, redeemed by satisfying punishment of the perps. Despite its German setting, and Turkish businessman, we are in something familiar, not exotic. These aren’t two obvious crooks and a sleazy husband but three people making their way in ways we can understand. Man and wife aren’t in love with each other, but they work together. He has put together a business through hard work and little mercy. Be early. Be on time. Immigrants run cheap food stands. Life is work. Pay your bills. Don’t cheat me. Drink too much. When there are several very serious clinches we have no doubt as to the intensity of desire but there is no voyeuristic camera lingering. In fact it is desperate hunger in desperate haste, as experience often is. Their passion is a piece of the larger story, their lived-in-lives, disrupted by the hammering of desire, desire disrupted by life’s realities. Even as their scheme begins to build, even at those points where we might say, “not a good idea!” we can’t be sure that we, ourselves, in this version of the story, wouldn’t do exactly the same.
There is no particular need to see these films in order, though if you do, watching the growth of director and actors will be an added benefit. Watching several in a group, in any order will, as with many fine directors, add coherency and understanding of directorial concerns, themes, references to each other and to other films. Make a week-end of three or four! All but Phoenix are available from on-line sources, and I imagine it will soon be, also. If you can track it down locally, viewing on a large screen has its own, well-known benefits.
As for myself, I’ll be looking for earlier Petzold works such as Yella (2007), Wolfsburg (2003) and The State I Am In (2000).
For a few more reviews see Dialog International, eScholarship, Filmmaker, and a long essay with most of his movies summarized at Senses of Cinema.