4 stars out of 5
This is an example of a movie that I ended up liking a lot more than I realized while watching it. Because there were definitely a few things going on that I wasn’t crazy about:
—It’s really cheap-looking. Sometimes the production values reminded me of a basic-cable TV movie, and sometimes it even felt like a student film.
—Tied to that, this never really feels like it’s taking place in 1945.
—If your movie called Phoenix is about a character’s rebirth, please please please don’t have a nightclub in it named Phoenix.
But still, I was pretty intrigued from the beginning. You’ve got a female Holocaust survivor, head wrapped up in bandages like the Invisible Man, as the passenger in a car. (The movie is German, with English subtitles.) It’s night, quiet, we’re near a bridge, with U.S. soldiers at a checkpoint. Their gruff leader demands to see the passenger’s face. (He gets to; we don’t.) An eerie mood is established.
The haunting feel continues at the hospital, our bandaged heroine Nelly first confined to a bed, then wandering the halls and the grounds like a living ghost. It’s here that she’ll be repaired. (How advanced was reconstructive surgery in the ’40s anyway? The doctor seemed a little overconfident in his abilities to me, adding to the overall fakeyness.) But a key question is raised: How much is our identity tied to our appearance?
Nina Hoss, as Nelly, is (bandaged) head-and-shoulders above the rest of the actors here, talent-wise. We believe she’s been damaged, physically and mentally, by the horrors she’s experienced; we feel her pain during her slow and incomplete rehabilitation. Her friend Lene is supportive but also the voice of reason. And then there’s Johnny, Nelly’s sleazy husband who doesn’t recognize her anymore—doesn’t know it’s Nelly. This brings up Big Theme No. 2: Can we successfully revisit the past? Why are we so drawn to it, even when there are warning signs? The actor playing Johnny does an OK job, despite the fact that he looks like the love child of Brendan Fraser and Ron Livingston.
The tension slowly builds, with an interesting plot development late in the film, and a really nicely handled final scene. You get a taste of history here—Jews in Berlin after the war, dreams of a new life in the Middle East—but primarily this is a psychological thriller, and a pretty good one at that.
Jack Silbert, curator