Phoenix (2014)

Germany, in the earliest days after World War II. Former singer Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss) has just barely survived the Holocaust, ending up with a disfiguring headshot wound. Saved by her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) and brought to a hospital in Berlin, Nelly undergoes reconstructive surgery that looks rather successful for the era but leaves her with a face only resembling her old self, furthering the alienation caused by the trauma inflicted by the KZ and the particular horror of surviving what so many – among them quite a lot of people she knew and loved – did not. The only thing that really seems to keep Nelly functional is an increasing obsession with finding her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), even if it is by roaming the at this point desperately dangerous streets of Berlin at night.

Lene, just as stricken by the experience of the Holocaust as Nelly is, but trying to channel her pain into anger at the betrayal (or the many betrayals) the Germans committed on the Jews, as well as into attempts of convincing Nelly to go to Israel with her, is less than happy with Nelly’s attempts at finding Johnny. Lene is convinced that Johnny betrayed Nelly to the Nazis, and that Nelly is losing herself in the past when the only way to go on after what she has been through is to find a future as far away from that past as possible.

Eventually, Nelly does indeed find Johnny, but Johnny doesn’t recognize her anymore. In an ironically cruel twist of fate, he only sees her as a stranger with a huge resemblance to his wife, a resemblance he decides to make use of to get his hands on Nelly’s money, presenting a living “fake” Nelly being the only way to do that for a guy everyone believes to have sold his wife out to the Nazis. Nelly decides to agree to his plan, dazed by trauma, love and perhaps an awakening wish to understand what Johnny actually did (or did not) do to her.

As the regulars among my imaginary readers know, I’m generally rather down on the way genre cinema that isn’t insipid comedy has been treated in Germany, historically. Unlike in other countries, most filmmakers from the artsy side of town don’t seem to have any interest of working with genre tropes and forms either, probably fearing the dirt of popular culture getting on their opera gloves (nothing against the opera – opera gloves on the other hand…).

As always, there are exceptions to that rule, and one of them, perhaps the most interesting and certainly one of the most important ones, is Christian Petzold, a man who has never made exactly what I’d call a straight genre movie even in his TV work inside of genre series, but has been using elements of genre, combined with a precise visual language put into service of portraying very complex people and situations, and the usual foot in the German Autorenkino, to make some of most interesting German language films in the last decades, often using the considerable acting talents of Nina Hoss.

Petzold seems particularly interested in putting his fingers on very specific German wounds, the important historical or personal moments Germans try their utmost to avoid of actually engaging with outside of school and outside the sort of historical documentaries that are putting as many walls as possible between a viewer and the actual experience of those having suffered through this history. So it was really only a question of time until he engaged the Holocaust, or really, the experiences of Jews having survived the Holocaust encountering a Germany that does its damndest to pretend nothing worth talking about happened, a pretence at normality that more than just borders on the unreal in a Berlin still in ruins.

To do this, Phoenix uses elements of the noir and the melodrama, both genres built for exploring alienation, the unwanted and the shadows between memory and reality. While the film’s surface seems as calm and slow as is typical of “respectable” contemporary German filmmaking, there’s a simmering intensity to the film, the impression that the three main characters are barely holding it together and might just break down completely at any given moment, Hoss’s Nelly having been robbed in the KZ of all belief in herself, barely able to look even Lene directly in the face, shaking and stiffening when going through Johnny’s reconstruction of the wife he believes dead through her; Johnny projecting a desperate kind of hunger between what’s left of what must have been a considerable amount of charm and joie de vivre; and Lene trying to bury all her sorrow and pain under caring for Nelly, taking care of practical things and dreaming about vengeance and security. That this film’s climax isn’t a scene of wild accusation and tears but one of Nelly singing “Speak Low” to Johnny’s piano playing, and revealing everything that has been unsaid by her up to that point, is just par for the course for the film’s tone.


This isn’t all Phoenix does, though. Petzold is also exploring the question of revenge and forgiveness in this specific historical moment and specifically which of the two might be more conducive to actually living a life afterwards for the victims of atrocity; and the murkiness of truth and identity. There’s also a lot more going on in the relationship between Nelly and Lene here, but then, Petzold really does manage to put quite a bit more resonance and complexity into any given scene than seems probable without overloading things with meaning. In fact, if there’s one thing I admire most about Phoenix, it is the clarity and preciseness with which it speaks about all those things that are not clear and precise to talk about.