Christian Petzold’s Phoenix oozes all the smoky atmospherics of a good noir but none of its lurid melodrama. Told in his characteristically direct, spare style, last beautifully wrought in the 2012 GDR-era Stasi drama Barbara, this enigmatic tale of Nelly Lenz, a concentration camp survivor (Nina Hoss) seeking to reunite with her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), who may have betrayed her, is spellbinding cinema. It’s a small marvel of lean construction, with stark, uncluttered images that haunt you long after.
Petzold and his collaborator, the late Harun Farocki, strikingly appropriate film history to ruminate on memory, identity and post-war recovery: Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face is echoed in Nelly’s bandaged head, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo features prominently when Johnny, unable to recognise Nelly post-reconstructive surgery, orchestrates an admittedly preposterous scheme to claim her inheritance.
These scenes, where Johnny is training and remodelling Nelly to be the most convincing version of herself, have an intimate, chamber-drama-like feel that allows its rich, uncanny ambiguities and ironies space to sink in. Through the experience, even with knowledge of Johnny’s deception, Nelly quietly relishes the chance to start over and possibly entertain a new romance.
Hoss is astounding: she has the ghostly, weary presence of someone who’s just risen from the rubble of a bombed-out city, and does impressively subtle work manoeuvring the two different Nellies at the same time. Her final scene will break your heart, but it’s also so dazzling — a real sleight-of-hand zinger — that you’ll want to watch the film all over again.
