Not every Phoenix can rise from the ashes

In the rubble that was post-war Berlin, survivors of the war and the camps wander like ghosts looking for the familiar in places and people.

“Phoenix” is noir at its darkest, a story of a missing heir, a treacherous husband, and broken hearts lost in the cracks of a devastating world war.

After her rescue from the concentration camp by friend Lene Winter, Nelly Lenz, her face disfigured by a bullet to the head in Auschwitz, searches for herself.  She doesn’t see herself in the mirror despite excellent work by the plastic surgeon.  Nina Hoss is riveting as Nelly, physically fragile but so strong willed that she survived Auschwitz and continues to search for her past life, particularly for her husband Johnny.  Ms. Hoss makes Nelly complex, lived in, and shattered.  She is broken but determined.  Pre-War Nelly was a singer, she cared about Johnny and music and her jolly pre-war life.  But to the Nazis, she was a Jew. Johnny hid her existence for some time, but then she was discovered.

Or was she?  According to Lene, Johnny turned her in.  We see the divorce papers to show that he saved himself by betraying her. Or was it ever a choice?

Nelly searches night time Berlin for Johnny, finds the wrong people, and a club called Phoenix.  Its neon-lit charcoal gray shows it as a grungy, desperate attempt at recreating 1930s Berlin nightlife.  Two women dress alike and sing old German and American songs.  Nelly finds Johnny, but he denies the name (going now by Johannes) and is sure she is not his wife.  He convinces her to pretend to be Nelly — he will groom her, model her, train her — so as to inherit her family fortune. He’ll split with her, he says.

As Johnny Lenz, Ronald Zehrfeld has a sad, bad boy charm.  While there is no comparison with his wife and her lost family, he too is broken, like the devastated Berlin.  The film is oddly suspenseful, though we cannot help but know how it will turn out.  Nelly comes home from Johnny’s basement room and tells Lene the plan to disguise herself as herself in Johnny’s plan — think “Anastasia.”  Lene tries to argue for their emigration to Israel, but Nelly is adamant that she doesn’t consider herself a Jew and all she wants is her husband.  The next time Nelly goes home, Lene is gone forever.

Lene, the wonderful Nina Kunzendorf, cannot bear to hear the German songs she sang before the Nazis decided to annihilate the German Jews.  And the Polish Jews.  And all the Jews.  She was part of Germany that was and now she cannot bear to hear German songs.  Speak Low, with music by the German ex-pat Kurt Weill (lyrics by Ogden Nash), runs through the film and is set up to be heartbreaking.  Nelly used to sing it, accompanied by her pianist husband Johnny.  Nelly promises to one day sing it again for Lene.  We cannot believe she will, or even can, but eventually she does on the day she acknowledges that Lene was right about Johnny all along.

Christian Petzold directed his own screen play, co-written with Harun Farock, based on a novel by Hubert Monteilhet (Le Retour des Cendres), which is also the basis of a 1965 film by J. Lee Thompson, “Return From the Ashes.”

This is a tale of two movies.  Phoenix, made in 2014, which I saw this summer at my local movie house.  The other, Return From the Ashes, was made in 1965, and I watched it on DVD out of curiosity, since it is said to be closer to the original source material.  Two quite different films with the same plot points, based on a French crime thriller by a crime writer, Hugo Monteilhet.  I cannot verify this because I haven’t found the book.

I found Phoenix moving and riveting, but I also found the disparity between two films based on the same book to be fascinating.  Clearly screenwriter Julius Epstein and director J. Lee Thompson were filming a nourish thriller based on the novel when they made Return from the Ashes.  Petzold and Farock, however, had a different story to tell with similar plot elements.  Instead of a French Jew returning to France at the end of the war, as in the film Return From the Ashes, Petzold’s German Jew, who spent a great deal of pre-war time in Paris, returns from Poland to Germany.  There is no romance in Phoenix, there is no philandering.  There is no sex.  Where, in the earlier film, the husband betrays the missing wife with other women, including her own stepdaughter.  But he did not betray his wife to the Nazis as in Phoenix.  Return From the Ashes is just a crime story set at the end of World War II where a woman who survived the camps needs plastic surgery to look like herself when she returns to her unfaithful but beloved husband.  Phoenix tells the story of a woman who can never find herself despite plastic surgery.  Epstein and Thompson flashed back to the past to show how the characters got to where they are.  Petzold does not flash back to the past, for it is too far gone.  Phoenix shows more of the aftereffects of war, which the earlier film — and perhaps the novel — did not.  Both films are interesting, and since they’re really different genres, I could not choose one over the other.  While I am glad to have seen Phoenix at the movie house, both films are available on DVD.

So see both, but be warned:  The 1965 British crime thriller is entertaining but dated in its style (and its trailer is annoying) and a paler shade of gray.  In shades of noir, bear in mind that Phoenix is very much darker and meant more to give us pause than enjoyment.

~ Molly Matera, signing off to read a different novel by Monteilhet.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's Last Great Film Role

A Most Wanted Man is an old-fashioned spy story with all too current stakes.  Based on the John le Carré novel of the same title, the characters are weary but dogged — if we like them.  The others….slither.

In his last film, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a German spy named Gunter Bachmann who acknowledges that he commits acts against the German constitution while trying to keep tabs on and track down potential terrorists.  He is the quintessential John le Carré spy, ever out in the cold, sad, lonely, probably an alcoholic, and dedicated to protecting the world, his contacts, and his own belief in what is just, which is not the same as legal. 

Philip Seymour Hoffman as Gunter  Bachmann.  Photo Credit: Roadside Attractions

The time is now, the city is Hamburg, and it is shocking.  I haven’t been to Germany since before 9/11, but I cannot recall litter except in the vicinity of U.S. army bases, or graffiti anywhere. In today’s Hamburg, both are everywhere.  The light is harsh — the sun doesn’t shine, it glowers in a garish show of illumination without warmth.

Gunther trusts no one in the German political arena and certainly not the American (represented with chilling arrogance here by Robin Wright, her façade clean, modern, even chic). Gunter will use entrapment, extortion, blackmail, cajoling and hugging to get what he wants from the informants he has cultivated into his network.  This is all for the greater good, and he at no time wishes to use violence in his network.  That’s for the Americans.  He will use threats of deportation, he will kidnap and intimidate. He coerces young Jamal (Mehdi Dehbi) to sneak and spy on his own family and mosque, and just how far Gunter expects his network to go is shocking.

Robin Wright as the  American, Hoffman as the German. Photo Credit:  Roadside Attractions.

The tension level is consistently high as we follow the slightest facial expression of each of the driven, intense members of Gunter’s clandestine team:

• Irna (Nina Hoss)
• Maximilian (Daniel Brühl)
• Rasheed (Kostja Ullman)
• Niki  (Vicky Krieps)

Performances are low key, realistic, frightening.  Claire Simpson’s editing carries us along, shocks us, stops us, tosses us forward into the sliced and slivered scenes.  The shots are stark, the lighting cold, the river lifeless.  This is a new cold war and it drains the color out of everything in Benoît Delhomme’s cinematography.

We become part of Gunter’s team, so it is “we” who are following two men — a wealthy philanthropist who may be funneling money to terrorists and a Chechen Muslim who has entered Germany illegally, seeking asylum.  Abdullah, the philanthropist, appears to be suspected just because he’s Islamic.  He is sophisticated, kind, and beautifully played by Homayouin Hershadi.  The other subject of surveillance, Issa Karpov, appears like a homeless person on the brink of a psychotic break.  He is suspected of being a terrorist, particularly since he confessed to committing terrorist acts when tortured by the Russians.  But, as Irna states, who wouldn’t, when under torture by the Russians.  We are all breakable.  Issa (born Ivan) reveals himself extremely slowly in Grigoriy Dobrygin’s searing portrayal.

The Chechen finds refuge with another Muslim family seeking asylum in Germany, a Turkish mother and son.  Another network.  These people reach out to their lawyer, Annabel Richter played by Rachel McAdams, to try to get asylum and make contact with a banker who has something belonging to Karpov.  The lawyer is left wing and idealistic, or she’s just doing the opposite of what her family wants her to do.  She rides her bicycle all over Hamburg but can go to high or low society.  The character and her actions are totally predictable and Ms. McAdams does nothing to make it more.

Rachel McAdams and Grigoriy Dobrygin.  Photo Credit:  Roadside Attractions.

Rainer Bock is chilly as the angry German agent Dieter Mohr, working for an agency that is not clandestine.  To fend off this short sightedness, Gunter even talks to the Americans in hopes of gaining an ally for his longer-term and much smarter intentions.

Willem Dafoe is a well-heeled banker, angry, beautifully dressed even without comparison to the slovenly Gunter.  The banker’s wife sits at home, seen from outside as if on display before floor-to-ceiling windows, dressed for an evening out in a tight sheath and high heels, or perhaps for a photo shoot. She is not going anywhere.  This is a house not a home, an artist’s lifeless rendering of high fashion and just as stiff. Everything’s a pose, roles for the playing in the proper setting. 

Modes of transportation helped delineate character:  Issa came to Hamburg by mass public transportation, Annabel rides a bicycle, Gunter drives an inconspicuous old sedan, and the banker has a beautiful sleek machine that screams “Look At Me!”  One wonders if he’ll change cars at the end of the story.

Willem Dafoe and Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Photo Credit: Roadside Attractions.

Delhomme’s cinematography combines with Sebastian T. Krawinkel’s production design which engenders claustrophobia in both tightly enclosed spaces and open ones with long, empty views.  The images contrast the work done and lives lived in the shadows — Gunter retreats to the underground world of rathskellers — with the not-clandestine German government and the glamorous American meeting in high rise offices and restaurants with plate glass windows and strategic views.  There’s nothing pretty to look at no matter how high. 

Director Anton Corbijn skillfully manipulates us as Gunter manipulates his network and his team.  It’s exhausting.  Corbijn takes his time, lays out the story, lets us come to know his people. We care about them.  This is no typical American thriller.  Occasionally some driving is rather fast, but nothing else.  Except the abrupt ending.  Andrew Bovell’s screenplay (based on le Carre’s novel) is brusque, brisk, and as chilly as the cinematography, lending layers to each individual we meet. 

The actors do finely detailed, subdued work in this subdued world.  Grigoriy Dobrygin’s Issa allows us in as carefully as an abused animal, shaming our assumptions about him.  Robin Wright’s American is that brittle sophisticate, cold as ice, an adept listener with unfathomable eyes.  I recently read an article about le Carré and his ever-growing dislike of America.  Believe it. It’s right there on the screen.

As for Mr. Hoffman.  His performance is so naturalistic, he is so subsumed into the person of Gunter with Gunter’s entire life always alive in him, he becomes Gunter.  Consequently Gunter becomes our representative in the story, his view becomes ours.  We are in Gunter’s head, we become him.  Betrayal of Gunter is betrayal of us.  That is the power of Philip Seymour Hoffman. He is already missed.

The power of le Carré and Corbijn and Bovell is the niggling feeling that the next time you’re in a pub or on a train or getting into a taxi, you will look around you and wonder who’s watching.  Or you should. 

~ Molly Matera, signing off to read le Carré’s novel, which I assume will leave me as depressed as this thrilling film did.