Years of watching films screened at the Jewish Film Festival of Dallas have exposed a curious truth: Some of the best Holocaust dramas in recent years have come from Germany and are made by German directors.
The country's 21st-century soul-searching about what went horribly wrong and why has given us a phalanx of powerful films, one being Phoenix, directed by Christian Petzold. He also directed Barbara, whose star, Nina Hoss, elevates Phoenix to something extraordinary.
Hoss' Nelly Lenz is a disfigured Auschwitz survivor unrecognizable after facial reconstruction. Grieving for her old way of life as much as she is for her lost husband, Johnny, Nelly searches ravaged postwar Berlin longing for the man she loves - who may have betrayed her to the Nazis.
To those who consider Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo one of their favorite films, there is much to savor here. Once Johnny and Nelly reunite, without Johnny knowing Nelly is the woman in front of him, he goes about giving her a makeover, as Jimmy Stewart did to Kim Novak. The hair, the makeup, the walk all have to be just right.
It's Johnny's motives that are despicable, for Johnny symbolizes Germany and what it did, with assembly-line perfection, to manufacture the horror of the Holocaust. Johnny longs to make this new woman a duplicate of his wife, not because he wants the wounded soul in front of him to resemble his true love but rather to cash in on the money to which his wife was entitled as the only "survivor" of a vanished family.
Like the best Hitchcockian movies, Phoenix is psychologically intriguing, as it pores over questions of identity and obsession, forgiveness and recovery. We follow along, mesmerized by Nelly's journey, whose chilling conclusion will linger in the memory like a haunting ballad.
Phoenix (A-)
Directed by Christian Petzold. PG-13 (some thematic elements and brief suggestive material). 98 mins. In German with English subtitles. At the Angelika Dallas.
