Phoenix, Christian Petzold’s latest film, finds the German filmmaker working with many of his usual cast and crew, including cinematographer Hans Fromm and editor Bettina Böhler. The most significant of his recurring collaborations, however, is with star Nina Hoss, and marks her sixth film with the director. In Phoenix, Hoss plays Nelly, a concentration camp survivor whose face has been reconstructed after a disfigurement. Unrecognizable to those who knew her, Nelly decides to get close to them, and especially her husband Johannes (Ronald Zehrfeld), to determine who sold her out to the Nazis.
If the premise sounds farfetched, it fits comfortably within Petzold’s other films with Hoss. Their collaborations tend to follow a basic premise: a mysterious woman, played by Hoss, is introduced in a position of vulnerability relative to a man who either wronged her in the past or approaches her as a stranger with dubious, possibly predatory intentions. Eventually, Hoss’ ostensible victim characters reveal hidden strengths, even ulterior motives that radically reshape the films’ perspectives, often challenging an audience’s sympathy by shading in tortured sinners and the wrath of the abused.
In each case, the severity of both Petzold’s aesthetic and Hoss’ performance complement each other to magnify the ambiguity of the morality plays. Petzold favors long shots that nonetheless highlight the spatial and contextual limitations of the frame. The composition of interior spaces in Petzold’s films tend to dwarf the characters, with walls and doorways restricting the overall space to suggest the feeling of being trapped. Even expansive exteriors can have this effect, as in the shots of the country home of Laura (Hoss) and her abusive husband Ali (Hilmi Sözer) in Jerichow, with the tight framing of the rural home corrupting any supposed sense of idyll by highlighting the house’s isolation from others and from help. Petzold also uses this approach when introducing Hoss, who often enters the frame in action—leaving a pool in Something to Remind Me, walking down the street while throwing guarded looks behind her in Yella, sneaking free food out of her grocer job in Wolfsburg. The movement gives each character a sense of purpose while denying any concrete knowledge of what it might be to the viewer, who does not yet even know the person’s name.
Hoss scarcely provides any easily gleaned information herself. When a smitten lawyer (André Hennicke) tags along after her at the start of Something to Remind Me, her caginess could connote apprehension of the man’s clumsy, forward, advances, but the deliberate quality of her sharp stares and careful speech equally resembles a constructed pose, not one necessarily bound in anxiety. In Yella, she plays a data analyst hired on a freelance basis by a smarmy venture capitalist who tries to teach her about body-language cues to use in negotiations, gleaning tropes from John Grisham adaptations to adopt a manufactured relaxation meant, ironically, to make the other side more high-strung. Instead, Hoss’ Yella sits bolt upright and at the edge of her chair like a symphony player, her exaggerated formality presenting her as a rock that will not budge in the face of any attempt to mislead or cajole her. She also wears blood-red blouses that clash violently with the white and gray suits of the men with whom she meets, a matador teasing and thwarting these bulls of capitalism.
Hoss regularly hardens her eyes into unblinking stares adorned by eyebrows crooked at just the right angle to communicate either insouciant naivete or the patient study of a bird of prey on the lookout for weaknesses in her next meal. (It’s no coincidence that the least powerful and self-sufficient of Hoss’ characters, the abused wife of Jerichow, wears long bangs that cover those brows, muting the danger she otherwise suggests in spades.) Hoss masks a whirlwind of conflicting, manipulative interpretations and emotions underneath superficial minimalism, and at any moment can turn the tables on people, the stalked becoming the stalker.
Hoss’ poker face is the foundation of her early collaborations with Petzold, which are mostly straightforward thrillers in which the female lead seeks revenge for various traumas. Others, like Phoenix, feature explicit political context, like the Cold War-set Barbara or the post-reunification allegory of Yella. These films push the director and star’s shared reserve and restraint into the realm of the abstract, reconfiguring hurt and endangered women as embodiments of Germany’s torturous, unreconciled and perhaps irreconcilable contemporary history. Yella, for example, moves from the post-communist industrial decay of the east to take up her position as a ruthless capitalist in the more modernized west. Her arc is a morally ambivalent reckoning of the legacies of both halves of the formerly divided nation and the appealing yet dangerous consumerism created in the aftermath of reunification. That the entire film could be this woman’s dying fever dream as her wrathful ex drives her off a bridge only makes its fantasy of exploitative prosperity all the more haunting. Though ultimately still as much of a genre film as Petzold’s earlier films, Yella uses its slight, unrevealing style to attain a relevance most recent films about capitalism lack; heck, seen today, the arc of an East German woman coming to the west and driving money-handlers to despair marks Yella as the best film about Angela Merkel’s campaign against Greece, made a decade before the fact.
On its face, the premise of Phoenix, that plastic surgery in the 1940s could be so advanced as to give a woman an unrecognizable yet flawless new face, is patently absurd. But its symbolic properties open up the film to new dimensions, ones made yet more intriguing by the film’s oneiric forays into night spaces where highly chromatic lighting and classic noir blocking and editing send the film itself back into the 1940s. Vertigo is a touchstone of Petzold’s films which feature Hoss’ duplicitous characters, but Phoenix’s employment of banal effects workarounds and literalized symbolism also recalls the work of Fassbinder, who used similar tools to confront the legacy of German guilt in the post-WWII era. Hoss’ Nelly isn’t just a Holocaust survivor but the Holocaust itself, directly confronting her betrayers who nonetheless fail to adequately recognize and atone to her.
If Petzold’s stripped-down, obscuring aesthetic bridges his potboilers with his political allegories, so too does his Flannery O’Connor-esque sense of grace. One can anticipate a Petzoldian climax within the first 30 minutes, yet the conclusion is anything but predictable. In his films, the desire for easy, cathartic revenge must confront, at the last second, the nagging voice of conscience, and the tensest moments come not from the ways in which Hoss hones in on her target, but how she reacts when she finally nabs them. In one film, a killer manages to atone to a furious avenger; in other, revenge is actually taken, yet a call for help is actually made. Phoenix, like Petzold’s other political films, relies on such reversals or complications of expectation not only for dramatic effect but as reflections of political quagmires that revenge movies could not hope to solve.
