Christian Petzold’s Phoenix creates a bracing tension between rediscovery and denial, between traumatization and angst. Nina Hoss, one of the world’s finest film actresses, portrays Nelly Lenz, a concentration camp survivor who undergoes plastic surgery that essentially grants her a new face after her old one was shot up by Nazis.
At the film’s outset Nelly’s new persona gradually comes to life. She’s in Berlin, recovering from the procedure under the tutelage of her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), who insists Nelly’s non-Jewish husband Johnny gave her up to the authorities to save himself. Lene offers Nelly refuge in either Haifa or Palestine, and informs her she is an heir to a considerable sum.
What follows is a non-thriller thriller of the highest order. Nelly, a former nightclub singer, ignores Lene’s cautions and finds Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) bussing tables in a Berlin club called Phoenix. He doesn’t recognize her yet upon meeting Nelly considers her close enough in looks to his presumed dead wife that he devises a scam to use her so he can collect her inheritance. Nelly’s attachment to Johnny is transfixing.
Hoss is so convincing, we feel her every pain and bewilderment. Not for a moment does her reluctance to reveal herself feel flimsy, or her obsession with him seem inauthentic. A longtime collaborator with Petzold, Hoss’s previous film with him was Barbara, an equally unorthodox yet sublime character study, in which Zehrfeld also co-stars.
The unique aspect of Phoenix is it somehow gets at significant truths regarding the aftermath of The Holocaust through means that seem outwardly sinuous. Any potential plot absurdity, however, fades into a stunning realization that against the backdrop of what a character like Nelly has endured and continues to endure–only in new manifestations–fantastical elements not only make sense but seem required. Phoenix has the effect of death by a thousand cuts. One moment merely following along an odd but captivating tale, then via the powerful sum effect of Hoss’s genius (and that of Bertold Brecht) culminating in the film’s amazing last scene, I, for one, left the theater totally devastated.