War born

Phoenix, a German film based on a French novel (Return from the Ashes by Hubert Monteilhet), is an extraordinarily nuanced psychodrama about survivors of World War II and the Holocaust. Historical and social implications are unavoidably a big part of it, but the special brilliance of this film by the esteemed Christian Petzold (Yella, Jerichow, Barbara) is in its unusually complex and sensitive characterizations.

The setting is Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Nelly Lenz (an excellent Nina Hoss), returning from a concentration camp and recovering from disfiguring facial wounds, ventures out into the ruins of the city in search of remnants of her prewar life as a singer and newlywed.

Plastic surgery has restored a semblance of her previous good looks, but she finds herself going unrecognized. And her fragile sense of her own identity becomes especially dramatic and aggravated when she begins looking for Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), the husband from whom she was separated by the war and Nazi detention.

The two-person psychodrama that plays out in the movie’s film noir-like atmosphere comes to a suspenseful boiling point when Johnny fails to recognize Nelly (he believes she died in the war), but sees enough of a resemblance to think she could credibly claim to be Nelly in order to collect a family inheritance.

The complexly emotional interplay of these two as they struggle to play out Johnny’s scheme brings forth a small but remarkable multitude of illusions, delusions, self-doubts and self-deceptions in both characters. The net result is an extraordinary dual portrait of two hard-pressed people whose contrasting selves are both wounded and wounding.