PHOENIX ****
A woman is fading away through darkness; her movements are noticed as she looks for a way out of it, a way to reconnect with the emotions she had lost among other things buried by the horrors of war. After surviving the sufferings of a Nazi camp, and going through a surgery to reconstruct her disfigured face, she returns to Berlin, as an unidentifiable woman, who had died for the past and has been given a new chance to heal the scars in her soul. But the once famous singer has returned to her destroyed home with one single motivation: she won’t rest until she finds her husband, or at least figure out what’s happened to him. The aesthetic of shadows and darkness is constantly connected to the protagonist, becoming her most personal characteristic. Since the beginning of the film, Nelly is seen as a survivor reascending from the ashes, a woman delving into an empty space where she can’t identify anymore. The breathtaking cinematography captures her silent agony and desperation, the fear of being abandoned by life itself, and also reveals her courage to engage herself into an uncomfortable situation, in order to claim back her status of a wife, an artist and a woman.
In other words, she needs to be loved again to make sense of all the tragedies she’s been through. Director Christian Petzold could easily have turned this intriguing drama into a melodrama or a bizarre tale about the horrors of war; instead, he conceived an accomplished and profound study on female perspectives (he did the same with “Barbara”), a fascinating work about the power of love, the consequences of greed, and how unfortunate are those blinded by the corruptive manipulation of money. When she finally finds her husband, working in the night club of the title, he is unable to recognize her, and although he’s amazed by the resemblance of his “late-wife”, he offers her to ‘play’ a role in his game as he tries to collect the inheritance left by her family. She goes with his plan, following his instructions of shaping her into the charming singer, uncertain of how far they’ll go with the farce, but hoping he’ll somehow see the light and finally accept she’s alive. Crafted with skilled techniques that evokes the nostalgic and dazzling classic era of great suspense, Petzold created a complex and disturbing mystery that increasingly grabs the audience, until its climax, a definitive and spellbind interpretation of “Speak Low”. That said it’s time for the Academy to enlist Nina Hoss in the hall of the greatest performers of 2015. Bravo!
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