Phoenix

If you’re the type of revolt­ing pedant who flip­pant­ly chides Alfred Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go for being too full of gap­ing plot holes, you may want to take a giant swerve away from direc­tor Chris­t­ian Petzold’s clas­si­cal­ly-inclined Phoenix, a trau­ma­tis­ing post­war melo­dra­ma which puts a del­i­cate strain on nar­ra­tive cred­i­bil­i­ty at the ser­vice of mak­ing dar­ing and pro­found state­ments about the mys­ter­ies of human­i­ty at large.

The sto­ry it tells hinges on a char­ac­ter being unable to see what the audi­ence can see plain­ly, almost like a lux­u­ri­ant yet ago­nis­ing Punch and Judy show. This character’s igno­rance (or blind­ness?) is played with brac­ing earnest­ness, and one might detect defi­cien­cies in Petzold’s writ­ing before under­stand­ing that this mas­ter direc­tor is play­ing a longer game, reveal­ing his Ace-stuffed hand only in the film’s breath­tak­ing final frames.

Phoenix is about two peo­ple, both of whom are giv­en equal weight­ing and con­sid­er­a­tion in the detail of the script and the empa­thy of the cam­era. One is Nel­ly, played by Nina Hoss, a for­lorn, con­fused Jew­ish club chanteuse and con­cen­tra­tion camp sur­vivor who has under­gone facial recon­struc­tion surgery fol­low­ing her ordeal. The oth­er is John­ny, played by Ronald Zehrfeld, a stocky, sweaty piano play­er turned glass col­lec­tor who may or may not have shopped Nel­ly – his lover – to the SS. The knee-jerk assump­tion is that Nel­ly would be out to seek vengeance.

And she does, though hers is a slow and cumu­la­tive form of emo­tion­al score set­tling. John­ny, on the oth­er hand, is so con­vinced that Nel­ly is dead (a belief that pos­si­bly relates to the hor­rors he’s wit­nessed), that when Nel­ly presents her­self to him, he instant­ly sees her as a dop­pel­gänger whom he can manip­u­late into help­ing him secure the ​“real” Nelly’s con­sid­er­able fam­i­ly for­tune. It’s a set-up that deft­ly reflects the bit­ter­sweet arti­fice of cin­e­ma itself.

Pet­zold sto­ical­ly refus­es to paint John­ny as an awful per­son, despite the fact that every­thing he does trans­lates as cal­lous and self-serv­ing. Plus, his his­to­ry of wrong­do­ing is always fudged to the point of uncer­tain­ty. If he is, indeed, guilty of these heinous crimes, then is it pos­si­ble to accept that the bat­tle-scarred and pos­si­bly deliri­ous Nel­ly would have it in her heart to for­give this man she loved beyond rea­son? On the oth­er side of this com­plex intrigue is Nina Kunzendorf’s Lene, who wants Nel­ly to sev­er ties with her painful past and become one of the key bene­fac­tors of a new Jew­ish state. To her, Nelly’s desire to recon­nect with John­ny is sym­bol­ic of a cal­cu­lat­ed affront to all those who suf­fered at the hands of the Nazis.

The film’s brit­tle nar­ra­tive pin­cer move­ments are gov­erned by the very spe­cif­ic con­di­tions of the post­war polit­i­cal cli­mate in Ger­many. It may sound like a dra­mat­ic cop out, but Phoenix exam­ines a brand of evil that exists beyond human com­pre­hen­sion, where actions are so devoid of the con­stituents of naked com­pas­sion that one might well become vio­lent­ly detached from any sense of ratio­nal per­spec­tive. John­ny can see Nel­ly. But he can’t believe she exists. To do so would be to accept abom­i­na­tions so appalling, that life itself would not be worth living.