In late June of 1945, one woman is escorting another through a US checkpoint in Berlin. The young American soldier is somewhat cocky and feigns an officious sort of suspicion that causes him to demand the bandaged woman reveal her face – just to be sure. The obvious agony she feels just beginning to unwind the various layers which hide her identity is enough to convince him that he’s made a cruel mistake and he lets the pair pass.
Finally Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) delivers the wounded Nelly (Nina Hoss) to a specialist hospital. A survivor of Auschwitz, Nelly was at some point shot in the head and left for dead. Though she miraculously survived, her face is ruined – missing nose, shattered cheekbones etc. She will need extensive reconstructive surgery. “Who would you like to be?” her doctor asks her, but Nelly only wants to be herself – exactly as she was. The doctor advises against it – it can never be exactly the same and the uncanniness is something not everyone can get over plus it can be an advantage to be given the opportunity to start all over again with a new face, a new identity newly shed of all the scars of a traumatic past. Nelly, however, is insistent.
Returning to the city with Lene, she learns that her entire family and many of their mutual friends have been killed though others turned out to have been nazi sympathisers. Nelly repeatedly asks about her husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), but Lene is reluctant to talk about him. Roaming the streets alone at night she tracks him down to a seedy cabaret club, Pheonix, in the American sector where he now clears tables rather than playing the piano. When she calls him by his former name he barely reacts and fails to recognise her. Later he tracks Nelly down and makes her a very odd proposition – pretend to be his deceased wife to claim the inheritance then split the proceeds.
“I no longer exist” exclaims Nelly at one point. Robbed of everything apart from her breath, Nelly has been erased and replaced by something with no clear history. She wants to go back, to reclaim the life she led before exactly how it was but her home no longer exists – her city is in rubble, most of her friends are dead and the husband that she’s made the anchor of her survival may have been the very one who betrayed her.
Meeting Johnny (now “Johannes”) again and moving into his back room she studies for the role of a lifetime – once again inhabiting her former self, stepping into the shoes of a soulless ghost. Nelly pleads with him silently to remember – recall her from the abyss, recognise her living form as the woman who was taken away in October 1944. Johnny, however, cannot bear to think about the past. He’s convinced himself his wife is dead and is only interested in claiming her money to make a new life in the post-war world. No matter how the coincidences mount up as “Esther” not only looks like “Nelly” but also has her handwriting, voice and movement, Johnny refuses to recognise her or acknowledge their shared tragedy.
Operating like an inverted Vertigo, Phoenix is an extremely rich character drama which not only deals with one woman rebuilding herself from the ashes but also with her nation’s sense of guilt as it resolutely refuses to look the victims of its crime in the eye. Nelly needs to remember and have her existence acknowledged in order to reclaim her identity, but Johnny cannot bear to look, his guilt is so great that it would shatter his sense of self irrevocably. They dance around each other caught between past and future but both trapped, their passage blocked by the symbolic checkpoints that exist all around them in their now ruined city.
Just as the doctor told her, it can never be exactly the same. At the end of the film, Nelly’s transformation is complete, her selfhood restored though somehow different from before. Lene wanted to run away to Palestine, create a new world for her people free from fear and persecution, Johnny wanted to forget and Nelly needed to remember (and be remembered) in order to become herself again but in the end nobody gets quite what they wanted. Only Nelly by meeting her former self head on is able to evolve, finally pulling away from us, out of focus.
Petzold serves us ghosts of several varieties including those of our cinematic pasts by imbuing his melodrama with the gloomy allure of the film noir mixed with the uncomfortable psychology of the Hitchcockian thriller and the uncanny horror of Eyes Without a Face. Probing questions of identity which extend from the individual to the national it asks us to consider a post-war world of guilt and recrimination in which everyone is engaged in rebuilding an idea of selfhood which can take account of wounds suffered or inflicted. Difficult and complex yet beautiful too, Phoenix is anchored by the extremely accomplished performance of its star Nina Hoss and proves a hauntingly melancholy exploration of all it means to be alive.
Phoenix is currently available in the UK on blu-ray, DVD and VOD courtesy of SODA Pictures and is available in the US as part of the Criterion Collection.
Windows on Worlds 