Glasgow Film Festival 2015: Phoenix

Phoenix opens like a horror movie. A disfigured woman, her face swaddled in bloody bandages, is crossing the German border following the fall of the Third Reich. But director Christian Petzold’s touchstone isn’t Eyes Without a Face – it’s Vertigo. She’s Nelly (Nina Hoss), a holocaust survivor en route to Berlin where she hopes to have her mutilated face reconstructed. The operation isn’t a success; so much so that when she seeks out her husband, who may or may not have given her up to the Gestapo, he doesn’t recognise her. Instead he enlists her into a ruse to pose as his wife, who he presumes perished in the camps, so he can claim on her inheritance.

It’s a hokey twist, worthy of a Preston Sturges movie, but here it takes on heartbreaking proportions. We buy the premise because of the film’s dreamy quality: Phoenix’s Berlin is a rubble-strewn labyrinth and its inhabitants walking ghosts haunted by the recent past. Much of the film’s power emanates from Hoss, who’s mesmerising as a woman pretending to be someone else in front of her husband, who in turn coaches her on how to look and behave like her true self. The allegorical implications are clear: Nelly is her nation, scarred and changed forever, but trying to find itself again. 

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