Butler's Cinema Scene

“PHOENIX”  My rating: B 

98 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

“Phoenix” relies on outrageous coincidence to a degree that would prove fatal to a lesser film.

But Christian Petzold’s claustrophobic German drama somehow absorbs and defuses our objections,  thanks to some fine acting and an atmosphere of post-war loss and desperation that sinks into the bones.

When we first see Nelly (Nina Hoss), she’s fresh from a recently liberated Nazi concentration camp. Her head is wrapped in bloody bandages, the result of a German bullet that tore up her features.  Now she’s facing months of plastic surgery to restore her face to something resembling its original form.

Nelly is obsessed with finding Johnny, her husband, with whom she had a vocalist/pianist act.  Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), the Jewish relief worker who is handling Nelly’s case, says that most likely it was Johnnie who turned his Jewish wife in to the Gestapo to save his own skin.

But Nelly won’t be swayed. Once the bandages come off  she walks the streets of Berlin at night. One evening, in a nightclub called Phoenix, she sees Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld). He’s not playing the piano. He’s bussing tables and mopping floors.

But he notices this quiet woman who bears a vague resemblance to his former wife and he proposes that they team up to work a scam on the authorities.

As the last surviving member of her large family Nelly has a small fortune waiting for her in Switzerland.  Johnny has been rebuffed in his efforts to claim the money as Nellie’s widower.

Now he proposes that this woman pose as his wife. After all, she looks a bit like Nelly. He’ll teach her all she needs to know about Nelly, even provide her with items of Nelly’s clothing.  Together they will stage a heartbreaking reunion and later split all that money.

Ronald Zehrfeld,  Nina Hoss

The guts of “Phoenix” — a title that refers not only to the nightclub but to Nelly’s symbolic rebirth from war’s ashes — lie in the scenes in which Johnny tutors Nelly in…well, in how to play herself.

He’s mercenary, yes, but also a bit twisted up inside by the memories this exercise evokes. The question, of course, is whether Nelly will continue the deception or let Johnny know the truth.  Not to mention whether she has the strength to rebuff him for once and for all.

Hoss — she starred in “Barbara” (also for Petzold) and opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in “A Most Wanted Man” — has the features and movements of a woman who’s been through way too much. She moves as if her entire body is one big bruise, but she starts to regain a bit of her vibrancy when she moves in with Johnny.

Zehrfeld, meanwhile, keeps us guessing.  Is his Johnny nothing more than a con artist? Did he actually betray Nelly?  And is there more to his relationship with this stranger than mere opportunism?

The film has been beautifully filmed, giving us a Berlin filled with dark shadows (shades of “The Third Man”) and desperate people.

The heart of the piece though, is Hoss, an actress whose thoughts play out on her face.

| Robert W. Butler