the curtain descends
by Douglas Messerli
Christian
Petzold and Harun Farocki (screenplay, based on a fiction by Hubert
Monteilhet), Christian Petzold (director) Phoenix
/ 2014, 2015 USA
We're late,
Darling we're
late
The curtain
descends,
Everything ends
Too soon, too
soon
I wait,
Darling i wait
When you speak
low to me,
Speak love to me
and soon
—from “Speak Low” with lyrics by Ogden Nash
and music by Kurt Weill
Nelly Lenz (Nina Hoss), is a Jewish singer has just
been saved from Auschwitz, and after reconstructive surgery upon her face (she
has been shot, evidently at the last moments of internment), is encouraged by
her loyal friend, Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorf) to join her in Palestine to
help create a new Jewish state. Certainly, Lene, who has apparently waited out
the war in Switzerland, seems to assert that there is no future for them in the
haunted world of Berlin, where they previously lived.
Nelly, a
near shell of a being, emptied of emotional response and even the ability to
once again look like her former self (the doctor has warned her that her desire
to look as she did before surgery could never truly be achieved), is clearly
psychologically unable to move forward, and responds vacantly to Lene’s new
plans and pictures of the apartments she proposes in Haifa or Tel Aviv. Nelly,
after all, has survived her internment, in part, by focusing on her love for
her husband, Johnny, a Christian who was not imprisoned. Despite Lene’s
suggestion that it was he who betrayed her to the Nazis, revealing where she
was hiding, and Lene’s revelation that she has seen Johnny, who is now
attempting to get hold of Nelly’s money, presuming she has died in the camp,
Nelly is determined to reconnect.
Because
she now has to identity in the
present, Nelly cannot leave her past, and seeks out her husband, quickly
discovering that the ex-pianist is now working as a waiter in a cabaret in the
American zone, the Phoenix—its very title a symbol of the post-War German
desire to rise immediately out of its ashes.
When he reencounters the woman he has salvaged, witnessing her lifeless shuffle and spectre-like stare, he almost calls off the whole affair. Only her pleas to allow her to try to learn how behave as his now dead lover, wins her more time.
As hard as it may be to believe Johnny’s inability to recognize Nelly, who reports her name is Esther (“There aren’t many Esthers left,” quips Johannes), and as equally difficult as it is to imagine what she ever saw in this greedy brute, we become, nonetheless, engrossed by his attempts to makeover Esther into the Nelly she formerly was.
It’s only if one perceives this effort as a kind of metaphorical relationship, or—as with Vertigo’s Scottie Ferguson’s attempt to transform the ordinary working girl, Judy, back into the beautifully sophisticated Madeline Elster—a delusional condition that cannot permit the would-be magician to see the truth. Petzold presents it almost as a game of cat and mouse, as each for his or her own reasons, pretends—Johnny because he is so desperate to deny the past and to create a new world severed from it, Nelly because she is seeking a regeneration and is desperate to find explain the events that nearly killed her.
In this early scene it also becomes apparent that Lene’s caring and kindness toward Nelly may go further than that of friendship, that, in fact, she is seeking a deeper relationship with Nelly in their future in Palestine. As with most elements of this movie, Petzold never openly expresses this possibility, but we are forced to puzzle out the film’s truths, a bit like a detective story with no reliable investigator, in order to comprehend what Nelly, apparently, refuses to.
Soon after,
when Nelly attempts to visit to Lene once again, she discovers that Lene has
committed suicide, in a letter to her friend expressing the impossibility of
now going forward into the future. With the letter is a document, a divorce
decree Johnny evidently signed shortly after Nelly’s arrestment. Not only has
he betrayed her to the Nazis, but has attempted to wipe away all his
connections to her.
Esther, however, has gone too far to end the charade, and further plots with Johannes on how to return to Berlin, where he with a few of their former friends will greet her at the train, thus confirming Nelly’s return from the dead.
Esther, however, has gone too far to end the charade, and further plots with Johannes on how to return to Berlin, where he with a few of their former friends will greet her at the train, thus confirming Nelly’s return from the dead.
But
Johannes finally crosses the line, we might say, when he suggests that he will
have to scar Esther’s arm so that she might pretend to have her concentration
camp number cut away! She rejects any such attempt, refusing him entry to the
bathroom as she begins to make up and dress for the dramatized reunion.
During
lunch Nelly says very little, while the others murmur on as if there had been
no horrific past from which their friendly revenant has returned. Clearly
exhausted by their meaningless chatter, Nelly invites them inside for a brief
recital, whispering to Johnny that he should play the Kurt Weill song, “Speak Low.”
She begins
the song almost as Marlene Dietrich might, in Sprechstimme, before gradually moving, timorously, into a sung
melody, finally employing a fuller voice. As Johnny hears the singing, he
gradually begins to recognize his blindness, and, ultimately ceases his accompaniment:
this Nelly and his former wife are one and the same. Looking up, he (along with
Petzold’s camera) notices the concentration camp number stamped across Nelly’s
upper arm.
Nelly quietly
finishes the song, which begs the lover to speak of his love quickly before it
disappears, and quickly walks out of the room—and out of her own past, leaving
those within to face the frightful past of their own creation.
Phoenix makes no grand claims for
speaking of the entire German Nazi legacy, but by focusing upon a single being,
makes it clear that no matter how the survivors—both those who committed the atrocities
and those who permitted them—may attempt to forgot what has occurred, there
will be others who will never permit that amnesia. Any love they may have
wished to express has indeed come far “too late.”
Los Angeles,
August 10, 2015
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