“Trauma is no mere abstraction in Christian Petzold’s Phoenix. It’s not just a word to be spoken and left hanging in the air. It’s a face blotched with bruises in the aftermath of reconstructive surgery. It’s the timid posture and tentative footsteps of a woman named Nelly who was once a chanteuse and is now a Holocaust survivor. Nina Hoss, who plays Nelly, attires herself in the character’s trauma; it’s a physical fact of her performance, like the old red dress she’s coaxed into wearing. As Nelly unravels her own past, hoping it’ll lead to her future, Hoss keeps her gestures small and her disbelieving eyes wide. She moves and speaks with the reticence of a woman unsure about how to be herself. Luckily, she has an expert on hand to teach her.
“Her partner in this anti-romantic pas de deux is Johnny, her husband. (Or ex-husband? Widower? Identities grow slippery in this game of love.) He’s played by Ronald Zehrfeld as a mustachioed homme fatale: sleazy, scruffy, handsome. Believing Nelly dead, he conscripts this woman he doesn’t know is Nelly to play herself in an unconscionable scam for the sake of an inherited fortune. He trains her like a director giving pointers to an actress—a meta-cinematic parallel surely not lost on serial collaborators Petzold and Hoss.
“Nelly submits to Johnny’s tutelage, and Phoenix blooms into a pedagogical thriller. As he teaches her, so she too maneuvers him into spilling his secrets. Shot/reverse shot pairings, edited with stopwatch precision, chart the subtle shifts in power between them. The couple’s lessons build up tension until they reach a finale that’s like a pot boiling over. Nelly’s trauma may not heal, but she does assert an approximation of herself. Johnny, too, reaps some valuable wisdom, perhaps best put by the real-life tragic heroine from another of last year’s films: ‘And now the final frame / Love is a losing game’.” ~ Alice Stoehr
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