Deception can lead to the truth
Christian Petzold’s Phoenix opens at a roadside checkpoint in rural Germany, in the middle of the night. A car pulls up and the female driver is questioned with increasing intensity about her passenger, whose face is covered with bandages.
Despite the woman’s protests, the officer barks an order for the bandages to be removed; but his tone changes quickly once the passenger complies. We don’t see her face, but we get the point. After mumbling an apology, the officer allows the women to pass.
Nelly (Petzold favourite Nina Hoss) is a woman broken. The year is 1945, and she has returned from Auschwitz — barely. Her face has been devastated beyond recognition, her body sapped of all strength. Her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf ) brings her to a doctor, who performs reconstructive surgery, restoring her to some semblance of her former self. (She refuses his offer of adopting a different face, to begin anew.)
The two women settle into an apartment in Berlin, which Lene has secured while making plans for them to move to Palestine to take part in the building of a new Jewish state. But Nelly has other things on her mind — one thing, really: finding her husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld).
Lene is against the idea, and we soon learn why. Unlike Nelly, Johnny wasn’t taken to Auschwitz; he may even have had a hand in her capture. When she tracks him down, he is busing tables in a showbar.
He doesn’t recognize her, but he does see a passing resemblance to his ex-wife, which he hopes to exploit. He enlists Nelly to live with him in his shabby basement apartment while he grooms her to resemble the Nelly of old so they can lay claim to her estate.
Why Nelly doesn’t reveal herself is a question that lingers as Petzold’s drama unfolds. Hoss offers a gripping performance as a woman whose body and soul have been crushed and whose heart is being broken at every turn; yet she pushes forward, clinging to the faint hope that everything will somehow come together — that she may eventually be able to step back into her former existence, and that life will one day return to normal.
Zehrfeld is note perfect as the gruff, single-minded Johnny, oblivious to — or at least in denial about — the true identity of his new roommate. There is a certain theatricality to the proceedings, necessitating a suspension of disbelief that is more suited to the stage than the big screen.
But Petzold doesn’t flinch, and his actors stay the course, allowing the phoenix to rise from the ashes in the film’s poignant conclusion.