Phoenix (2014)
Directed by Christian Petzold
In the aftermath of WWII, German-Jewish cabaret singer Nelly has to undergo facial reconstructive surgery following her survival from Auschwitz. Without recognising Nelly, her former husband Johnny asks her to help him claim his wife’s inheritance. To see if he's betrayed her, she agrees, becoming her own doppelgänger.
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What critics compared Phoenix to
The camerawork has the chiaroscuro seediness of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), and for his plot Petzold mines everything from Dark Passage, a 1947 Humphrey Bogart noir about a wrongly accused convict who escapes from prison and undergoes plastic surgery in order to track down his wife’s real killer, to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
In fact, Phoenix is reminiscent of Carol Reed’s The Third Man in its narrative style and its use of music.
It’s a kind of post-war neo-noir with elements of Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair , Carol Reed’s The Third Man , and Hitchcock’s Vertigo — without ever leaning too heavily on any of these, owing to the themes of the story.
Visually and narratively, Phoenix is a pastiche of classic noirs (drawing heavily from The Third Man ), Rubble Films, and 50s melodramas.
Even a tryst with her lover Tim (Trystan Pütter, "War Horse," "Phoenix") is cool, a woman outwardly 'having it all' with no real, human connection.
Perhaps had Petzold's film fully embraced the melodrama of noir it might have worked (in the same way the somewhat comparable The Skin I Live In pulled off its own improbable identity crisis by relaying it with gumption); and, although the leads are characteristically compelling, the subtlety of Hoss and Zehrfeld's performances ill-suits the bold, difficult-to-buy premise, while Kunzendorf is frustratingly sidelined, even though Lene's story is equivalently intriguing.
A kind of cross between Black Book and The Skin I Live In —though nowhere near as outrageous as either— Phoenix stars Petzold’s longtime muse, the great Nina Hoss, as Nelly, a disfigured Holocaust survivor who returns to post-war Berlin after having her face reconstructed by plastic surgery.