“I’m more drawn to our dead than I am to our living.” Start to finish, the dramatically precise Phoenix takes its every cue from this encompassing, chillingly-recited line of dialogue.
Set in postwar Berlin and centered on a Holocaust survivor, Phoenix is haunted by what cannot be seen. The film opens on Nelly (Nina Hoss) exiting Auschwitz with severe facial injuries, her face bandaged up like a mummy. Forced to undergo reconstructive surgery, she emerges unrecognizable in the procedure's aftermath. She returns to the sight of her old home alongside friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), and all that’s left to see is rubble and shards. Nelly looks into a piece of mirror resting above the dirt, and gasps in horror at the sight of her new self. She can only see the invisible: a home, a life, a family and a person, all faded away.
Upon her arrival at a small German camp (co-occupied by locals and Americans), Nelly nervously wanders in the black of the night. Her quest, it’s soon made clear, can’t be focused on the future as Lene suggests – not with so much lost. Her husband, the gentile Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld, also a Petzold regular), is still alive, lurking around the camp. While there’s a question as to whether or not he actually turned Nelly in – Lene is convinced he did – Johnny is what kept her spiritually alive. He’s all that she had, and now, he's all that she has.
**
Director Christian Petzold fuses Hitchcockian tension with classical noir for Phoenix, before expanding into subdued melodrama as he approaches his thrilling climax. With this film, Petzold continues his exploration of dual identity and romantic tragedy (last seen in the terrific Barbara), bolstering the resonance of such ideas by working within a more abstract construct.
**
Director Christian Petzold fuses Hitchcockian tension with classical noir for Phoenix, before expanding into subdued melodrama as he approaches his thrilling climax. With this film, Petzold continues his exploration of dual identity and romantic tragedy (last seen in the terrific Barbara), bolstering the resonance of such ideas by working within a more abstract construct.
Fundamentally, Phoenix is a ghost story. It percolates with tension, sustaining its mood by situating characters’ actions within that sense of ensuing dread. When Nelly finds Johnny, he doesn’t recognize her, but he seeks her out with destabilizing rapidity even still. The film subsequently delves into a performative romance, Vertigo-style. Johnny recruits “Esther” (Nelly’s pseudonym), not realizing her true identity, to pose as his wife in order to acquire his (or her) inheritance. He coaches her on how to be her, from her handwriting to her hairstyle to her very way of walking. As Johnny constructs his wife as he knew her, Nelly reclaims herself, free of trauma and isolation.
The set-up here is admittedly, greatly contrived, but the film’s middle stretch, mostly confined to Johnny’s low-scale apartment, convinces as fascinating psychological drama. It plays like a piece of theater, rendered with an anticipatory score and a cinematographic distance. It shifts away from Vertigo, hewing closer to Truffaut’s performance-centric The Last Metro. Phoenix manages a confluence of the latter’s intellectual verbosity with an arrestingly twisty atmosphere. Its point-of-view is Nelly’s, but by entrenching herself in this alternate identity, absolutely everything between her and Johnny is left unsaid. It’s all investigative.
Interludes featuring Nelly and Lene break up the insular central action at Johnny’s apartment. In these brief scenes, Petzold lights Nelly like a silhouette, a faceless figure speaking to her increasingly skeptical and impatient confidante. She speaks of “being jealous of me,” or the version of Nelly whom Johnny so nostalgically longs for. She rebuffs Lene’s assertions of his betrayal. In effect, the physical darkness enveloping Nelly exposes a woman between who she is and who she was. She’s chasing a ghost.
The same could be said of Johnny. Perhaps the film’s most pivotal scene considers what Nelly “should” look like in her orchestrated re-emergence from the concentration camp. Johnny requests a perfected vision of Nelly, in immaculate makeup and with her trademark red dress. But Nelly, having lived through it, reminds John that it wouldn’t make much sense to appear so idealized. He consistently replies that “They won’t ask questions”: He’s asking “Esther” to perform the best version of Nelly, the one best kept in memory. The tragedy of his insistence is that he’s eventually proven correct – Johnny’s bourgeoisie family greets Nelly without suspicion and with airless joy. Like it never happened.
No matter how close she gets, “Esther” is always far from Nelly in Johnny’s eyes. His denial is indicative of a subconscious acknowledgment of truth that he refuses to activate. Petzold’s vision, in all its layers and intricacies, is clearest here: Johnny instructs Nelly to turn herself into a fantasy as a way to convince, but also because it’s the only way he could imagine her. Her reconstruction can only be rooted in that reminder of the past, rather than in a true contention with who she may have become. His potential complicity is both beside and completely the point: we come to know Johnny as a man who loved his wife regardless, but as such, what he may have done calls into question their entire relationship. It’s why they’re both chasing the “before.”
Phoenix is interpretive in the moral judgment of its characters – the emotions at play are authentically inexplicable. Hoss’ embodiment of Nelly is both thick and defined, but only because the actress brings to her a stringent, compelling perspective. The character is introduced as beyond vulnerable – a likely shell of her former self. But as Nelly recreates herself for the man she once shared a life with, Hoss imbues her with deepening resolve. Her burgeoning strength radiates. It’s a long tradition in theater and cinema, acting through acting and giving a performance about performance. But here, it’s a window into a sharper concept. Nelly is acting out herself, and as a result, Hoss is essentially playing the past. That characterization is realized within an aesthetic of impassioned melodrama and inevitable menace.
It’s all very precise. At its core, Phoenix is a tautly executed mood piece, swerving messily between genres but kept in total control due to its deliberate artistry. Consider Petzold’s astonishing final scene. A dolled-up Nelly sings to her husband “Speak Low,” the 1943 Ogden Nash ballad. She’s still concealed in her mask. In the music, the film unabashedly swells. Nelly’s sound, finally discovered, leaves you hypnotized. The final image thrusts Phoenix towards an ending of fatalistic irony.
And yet, the song itself is what guides Phoenix to its conclusion. The words say it all:
We’re late,
Darling we’re late.
The curtain descends,
Everything ends
Too soon, too soon.
Drawn to the dead, indeed.
Grade: A