A black Volkswagen approaches an army checkpoint at the Swiss-German border where a bunch of American soldiers, perhaps three or more, cluster around a metal barrier. In the background, a piano and upright bass duet fills the pitch-dark night with a mellow Speak Low. The driver is a woman, perhaps in her early forties, with slicked, raven black hair, a chiseled face and thick eyebrows. She takes a quick inquisitive look to her right before she pulls up. Someone is sitting right next to her, but who? As the soldier asks for their passports, the camera shifts to unveil a face covered in blood-soaked bandages, a body wrapped in blankets, a piercing gaze — a shattered, tentative body of a woman in the passenger seat. Oblivious to the driver’s …show more content…
The film, loosely based on Hubert Monteilhet’s novel Le Retour des Cendres, was co-written by the late Harun Farocki and Christian Petzold who also directs here. In Phoenix, Nelly (Nina Hoss), a former German singer and Auschwitz survivor, returns to Germany after the war ends in 1945. Her face is disfigured from a gunshot wound she has sustained, and, to her dismay, the reconstructive surgery she undergoes leaves her with a brand new one. Once recovered, Nelly seeks out her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) despite the warnings of Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), her friend and a clerk in the Hall of Jewish Records, that it was probably Johnny who betrayed her to the Germans. Nelly finds Johnny, a pianist who now goes by Johannes, working as a busboy at a nightclub called Phoenix. Johnny does not recognize Nelly, who introduces herself as Esther, but soon notices some resemblance to his wife whom he thinks is dead. Intent on collecting his dead wife’s inheritance, Johnny convinces Esther to impersonate her with the promise of splitting the money evenly. He painstakingly remodels Esther into Nelly, schooling her in how to look and behave like his late …show more content…
The inheritance plot drives the story forward and serves both as a narrative vehicle to the underlying themes and, together with the frequent return of Kurt Weill’s and Ogden Nash’s Speak Low, a glue that keeps the whole cohesive. Early on, Petzold carefully and subtly plants seemingly insignificant details, only to later return and reveal their importance: a divorce date on an index card that makes a brief appearance at the beginning turns out to carry a much bigger weight later on. The film owes as much to its writer-director’s storytelling talent as to Nina Hoss’ powerhouse performance. Hoss, who seems to barely move an eyebrow, channels a dizzying array of emotions through her eyes. She is the perfect Nelly. At its core, the story raises one essential question: how do you pick up the pieces and move on after such trauma? For Nelly, the way forward is to go back to Germany and cling to what once was. For Lene, the way forward is a fresh start in Tel Aviv. Phoenix is thus not only about one individual’s search for identity but also about the conflicting coping strategies of Holocaust