Phoenix
Produced by Schramm Film Koerner & Weber and Bayerische Rundfunk 
Directed and written by Christian Petzold 
Distributed by Sundance Selects 

The Gift
Produced by Blue-Tongue Films and Blumhouse Productions 
Directed and written by Joel Edgerton 
Distributed by STX Entertainment and Showtime Networks 

German director Christian Petzold’s new film, Phoenix, begins with a perfectly dark screen, while on the soundtrack a bass fiddle accompanied by a piano plays Kurt Weill’s hauntingly romantic melody “Speak Low,” which with Ogden Nash’s lyrics became the principal song in their 1943 musical comedy collaboration One Touch of Venus.  I found this exceedingly strange since I knew the film would deal with the grimmest of subjects: the trials of a terribly wounded Jewish woman in 1945 who has survived, barely, her Auschwitz imprisonment.  How could the Weill/Nash song comport with such material?  As it turns out, in Petzold’s hands it does brilliantly.  The woman is Nelly (Nina Hoss, exquisitely lovely and thoroughly convincing), whose face has been shattered by a Nazi bullet and is about to undergo reconstruction.  The plastic surgeon she goes to shows her photographs of popular film actresses and asks her to choose the one she’d like to resemble.  She resists, however, saying she wants to look like herself.  The doctor replies that it will be impossible to restore her original appearance.  Indeed, it’s more than her appearance that will be impossible to restore.  Nelly will soon discover her entire life has been irreparably shattered, as has her home city, Berlin.

As she recovers from surgery, she stays with her close friend, Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), who urges her to relocate with her to Palestine.  As Jews, Lene says, they have a duty to build a new state where their people can be safe.  Nelly rejects this.  “I’m not a Jew,” she insists.  Lene retorts that she should keep in mind that she was nearly killed for being one.  But Nelly is not persuaded.  She can only think of finding her husband, Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), who is ostensibly a Christian.  She’s unwaveringly devoted to him, which is probably why she doesn’t think of herself as a Jew.  She is deaf to Lene’s claim that after having protected her for years, Johnny, under pressure to save himself, finally betrayed her to the Nazis.

Dismissing Lene’s accusation, Nelly picks her way through the rubble of Berlin’s bombed buildings, in search of her husband.  Only slowly does it dawn on her that, no matter how hard she tries, she won’t be able to go home again.  Her home no longer exists and, more harrowing, perhaps never really did, not in the sense she thinks.

Since Nelly and Johnny were nightclub performers—she a singer, and he her pianist—she naturally searches the clubs still in operation.  One night she stumbles upon one lugubriously hidden in the shadows under a garish red neon sign reading, suggestively enough, Phoenix—named, we must suppose, for the brightly mythic feathered bird who is consumed by flame every 1,000 years only to rise from its own ashes again.  Inside, she finds Johnny working as a busboy.  But he doesn’t recognize her.  He does, however, remark the general resemblance this strange woman bears to his wife whom he presumes to be dead, a resemblance he calculates will be useful.  In a curdling bit of irony, he proposes to Nelly that she impersonate his wife, so that she can claim her wealth that the state is holding in her absence.  He promises her a portion of the proceeds.  At first shocked by his plan, Nelly decides to go along with it.  Why doesn’t she simply tell him the truth?  We’re never told directly, but it’s not difficult to infer.  In her troubled state of mind Nelly wants Johnny to discover the truth on his own.  She hopes, we must suppose, that this will confirm her identity under her changed appearance and, thereby, restore her to her former life.

Here we step into Hitchcock territory.  Petzold is clearly reworking the premise of Vertigo, and as Hitchcock did, he’s mounting an allegory about deception and identity, only here the question of who’s who goes considerably deeper.  In Vertigo, Kim Novak colluded with a very wealthy man who wanted to get rid of his wife.  Novak impersonated the woman so he could plot her murder and make it look like suicide.  Along the way, Novak unintentionally ensnares Jimmy Stewart, who becomes thoroughly infatuated with her under her assumed disguise.  Petzold has given this premise a redemptive twist.  Nelly goes along with Johnny’s inability to see who she is, hoping to revive his love for her.

Of course, as is often true with allegories, our willing suspension of disbelief is strained at times.  How can Johnny remain so blind?  When, late in the story, he has Nelly forge some official documents necessary to convince authorities she is really herself, he is amazed by her ability to duplicate her own handwriting.  Still, he doesn’t guess the truth.  His blindness signals a larger misprision.  Already in 1945, people prefer not to look back, not to recognize the consequences of having lived under Nazi rule.  That would be too troubling.  But the denouement makes the case that, like a phoenix, there will have to be a painful rebirth if people are to move forward with their eyes open.  Otherwise, as Nash’s lyrics have it, “The curtain descends, everything ends,” and the blindness will persist indefinitely.

This is a brilliantly designed film that bears repeated watching.  While it is steeped in the aftermath of World War II, it gestures to much more in our general moral experience.  We all must confront our past if we are to meet the future honestly.

Phoenix doesn’t say anything new or remarkable, but, as genuine art does, it has the power to sort out one’s stray, unformulated feelings concerning love and grief.  And that’s remarkable enough.

I don’t want to say any more, lest I give away too much.  But I do want to add a personal note.  As I mentioned, the film incorporates “Speak Low, When You Speak Love” from One Touch of Venus.  I’m not quite old enough to have seen this musical on Broadway, but I did see its 1948 film adaptation, a pale imitation of the stage production, I understand.  It starred Ava Gardner as Venus, and Robert Walker as her befuddled human swain.  Although I was only nine at the time, I’ve never forgotten it.  I think it must have been the first time I felt the astonishing power of feminine beauty.  Miss Gardner so mesmerized me in her filmy silk gown that I fell completely under her spell.  True, she couldn’t act, couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance, and lacked any smidgen of grace in her movements.  But her beauty blinded me to these deficiencies.  Then there’s “Speak Low,” which Gardner charmingly lip-synced.  Of course, I didn’t grasp the song’s aching evocation of love’s uncertainty and life’s brevity.  Nevertheless, I seem to have sensed how haunting it was.  Today, I have reason to know why.

The Gift is another film that tries to plumb the question of identity, but unlike Phoenix it fails to do so convincingly.  When Robyn (Rebecca Hall) and her husband Simon Callen (Justin Bateman) move into a high-end home in a Los Angeles suburb, they appear to be a conventional yuppie couple, happy, successful, and looking forward to an ever brightening future.  But things are not what they seem.  How could they be?  Conflict, after all, is essential to storytelling.  And so conflict shows up in the form of Gordo Mosely (Australian actor Joel Edgerton), who suddenly appears in the lives of this seemingly golden couple.  They meet him at the local supermarket, perhaps not entirely by chance.  Gordo introduces himself as Simon’s high-school classmate.  At first, Simon claims not to remember him, but then he hesitantly allows that they might have known each other slightly in the past.

Eager to cultivate the Callens’ friendship, Gordo pushes matters by leaving increasingly unwanted gifts at their doorstep, from bottles of wine to koi to populate their decorative landscape pool.  This irritates Simon to no end, so he decides to get rid of Gordo by rejecting him as rudely as possible.  But this raises questions in Robyn’s mind.  She wants to know what has prompted her husband’s cruelty.  Is it Gordo’s obvious signs of social and economic failure?  Could Simon be given to petty class prejudice?  She becomes increasingly stressed by the inexplicable tension between the two men, and, as she does, the emotional problems she’s been hiding behind her upper-middle-class veneer begin to appear.

While this premise is not without promise, as developed here it becomes increasingly strained until, in the last act, the plot becomes ridiculously unbelievable: Simon’s controlling nature suddenly begins to unravel when a pregnancy of doubtful origin intrudes.  Little in the script prepares you for this turnabout.

Since Edgerton wrote and directed the film along with playing the role of Gordo, what goes amiss could be put down to a lack of seasoning.

Let’s just say the film is an interesting failure.  We’ll have to wait to see what Edgerton does next with his filmmaking career.  He’s proved himself a very good actor in several productions, most notably playing Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby.  He may yet prove a talented director also.