Wreck of the symbolism – Germany new

Lene (Nina Kunz village) and Nelly (Nina Hoss)

Photo: Christian Schulz

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 This is a film about blindness and the Seeing Will, betrayal and displacement of guilt. It’s in “Phoenix” to what follows the survival of a Unortes as Auschwitz, to the lost life you have to look to make a fresh start to. A great fabric, a tragedy of ancient dimension, but also a great movie?

 Christian Petzold is the surreal Chamber Players under the German directors, leading enigmatic action constellations always something unexpected that suddenly the audience as each outer grounds back transmitting enlightenment in mind occurs. His films, if they succeed, are collective self-knowledge rituals. “Ghosts,” “Yella”, “Wolfsburg”, “Jerichow” and most recently “Barbara” bear witness to this championship Petzold, always with his lead actress Nina Hoss, who never plays a role, but these long pent in a state of intimacy transformed. So far it worked most excellent way. If you asked Petzold, what it is to go in his next film, respectively, he told an every time a rather improbable and intricate story that you never knew and you then also so never saw on the screen to happiness. But this time everything is different. Maybe it had so come to a director who is not afraid risk once. The film is – to say the same – in my eyes completely fails, it acts almost like an involuntary parody of art’s sake in Petzold’s earlier films. This is fatal, but perhaps a salutary hint: In this direction, he can not go on forever, otherwise it will remain in the end only the pure attitude, the assertion of art that it is based only on a series of ornaments

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 So we do a little research cause why something so fails as “Phoenix”, when those who worked on it, but certainly are rounder. This time you actually see only the story that you can read in the press release. Again, she is extravagant and implausible – but now, for the first time the duo Petzold / Hoss, you can see exactly filmed this constructed fable, nothing more. And so here joins a cliché to the other. Petzold himself talks about wanting to join here “Film Noir” with Technicolor. Slightly more neorealism would have been better.

 The idea in prose: Nelly comes in 1945 after the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. Because one has shot her in the face, her head is completely bandaged, her friend Lena (Nina Kunz village), Associate of the Jewish Agency, coming from Switzerland on his way to Palestine, they will return to Berlin. There, her face is operated on by a plastic surgeon. What she wanted for a face because he asks almost whimsically. Only her own back, it breathes under the bandage. Anyway, they like Nina Hoss always looks for the rest of the film like this, only slightly grayer and augenumränderter.

 It takes the first twenty minutes and is quite vain. More importantly, she seeks her husband Johnny in the ruined city, who had hidden for years and of the Lene now claims that he has betrayed to the Gestapo. Nelly can not believe it – wants to her old life with Johnny (totally miscast, because penetrating harmless: Ronald Zehrfeld), this obviously once appealing acting on them musicians back

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 She kicks him then surprising answer, but he did not respond, does not recognize them again, because he is firmly convinced that she was dead., But a certain resemblance to Nelly was still there, is this limp, expressionless man firmly and takes a devilish Schedule: This woman, who seems somehow similar to his wife, but could play in front of family and the authorities Nelly, so that he would finally approach to the inheritance of the murdered family

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 Nelly can be prepared to play himself – Johnny and she still does not realize he is struck blind. One can now negotiate detailed philosophical. If it detects it not because he has betrayed them? Prevents him his instinctive repression of their own to blame? If an entire nation at the moment of collapse, where a new beginning – the way forward – must follow, necessarily blind? Can who happened something unpronounceable awful, ever make it understandable, or is everyday always so relentlessly banal as usual?

 The key point is: It is believed that non-recognition of a moment Johnny dies and so the film is built on this amnesia. Nina Hoss tried the Auschwitz survivor, as she stands before her husband, but for which it is no longer present, as much as possible to play. But this time the symbolism utilized as lead on her.

 The game with the hard historical material wants in “Phoenix” not fit for little urgent chamber play by Nelly and Johnny. Petzold, who else can always surprise and can lift his films with a slight twist from all expectability, put this time in intentional fixed.

 A touching scene at the end of the film but then it should not be concealed. Nelly sings, accompanied by Johnny at the piano, who gathered for their reception family a song that will propel the lie of their false identity on the tip, so Johnny’s perfidious plan. But while Nelly sings (and Nina Hoss puts in this song all farewell, hoping to be recognized by the man she loved), one sees in Johnny’s eyes the sudden recognition. Too late!