“Phoenix” — One of the Year’s Best Films That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of

SEPTEMBER 7, 2015

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The plot of the new German melodrama “Phoenix” is absolutely preposterous.  And the film itself is absolutely wonderful.

Stay with me here.

Nelly (Nina Hoss) is a Berlin chanteuse who is ratted out and picked up by the Gestapo in 1944.  She manages to survive Auschwitz, but she is shot and left with a horribly disfigured face.  She returns to equally-damaged Berlin to undergo reconstructive surgery and begs the doctor to restore her face as she was.  He comes close but not quite.  Her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) begs her to start a new life with her in Palestine, but Nelly, whose entire family has been killed in the war, only wants to reunite with her pianist husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), even though Lene warns her that Johnny is the person who sold her out.

Nelly finds Johnny in the American sector nightclub called Phoenix (hmmm?) but he’s no longer a star but a lowly busboy.  She locks eyes with him, but Johnny doesn’t recognize her.  However, he thinks that there may be just enough resemblance to his dead wife that, with the right dress and makeup, he can pass this strange woman off as Nelly and split the large inheritance that she will inherit from her deceased family.  Nelly, desperate to be around Johnny, agrees to his scheme, and for days, Johnny tries to teach her to walk, talk and write like Nelly — in effect, learning how to play-act her own life.

Film fans will immediately notice echoes of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” in this story of reconstruction told this time from the woman’s point of view.  Reading the plot out loud, anyone would likely to have a few “hey, wait a minute” moments.  “Hey, wait a minute, you mean to tell me that he doesn’t recognize his own wife?  Or that she wouldn’t tell him the truth?  Or that she’s really going along with this harebrained scheme?”  But in the assured hands of writer/director Christian Petzold, you’ll never question the many twists and turns that the filmmaker has up his sleeve.

Petzold lays out his complex story with an absolutely straight face, with no nods or knowing winks at the audience.  This is the only way melodrama like “Phoenix” can work — you need to believe in Nelly’s desperate longing for Johnny and to care for her plight once she begins to see the reality of her situation.  That this works so well here is due in no small part to the skill and chemistry of the actors.  Hoss and Zehrfeld have worked together before in Petzold’s fine 2012 thriller “Barbara,” but they are even better here.

Zehrfeld gives Johnny a matinee idol persona belying the desperation of his situation.  Though his scheme and use of this strange woman is despicable, there are moments that register in Johnny’s face where he recognizes that there might be something in this stranger.  Fine, fine work.  Hoss, however, is flat-out magnificent.  From her zombie-like physicality when she first emerges from the bandages and sees a stranger reflected in the mirror to her first tentative steps in recapturing who she once was, Hoss reveals the layers of this complex character slowly until the film’s wow of a climax.

If there’s any quibble with “Phoenix,” it is perhaps the feeling that the film has a slightly uneven tone at times, with a few early two-character scenes playing a bit more emotionally dry when juxtaposed with the film’s big pulpy set-pieces.

Yet Petzold manages to tie the film all together by the use of the haunting ballad “Speak Low” throughout the entire film.  Once a song that Nelly and Johnny sang together on stage, it’s introduced in the film via a recording listened to by Nelly and Lene, who embraces the American ballad saying, “I can’t stand German songs anymore.”  (Ironically, “Swing Low” was written by German ex-pat Kurt Weill.)  After being used throughout as background music, the song is performed in the film’s final scene once again by Nelly and Johnny, and as the lyrics unfold and secrets are revealed and the balance of power irrevocably shifts…the result is electrifying.

GRADE:  A-