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Set after the Second World War, PHOENIX tells the story of Nelly, a disfigured Holocaust survivor (Nina Hoss). Unrecognizable after facial reconstruction surgery, Nelly returns to find out if her husband (Ronald Zehrfeld) has betrayed her or loves her.(https://xixax.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2Fkz33Hyb.jpg&hash=2c1c2c000e2f21edced01f26fbcb75b2e7121e2c)
Written and Directed by Christian Petzold (Barbara)
Starring Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, and Nina Kuzendorf
Release Date - TBD (TIFF premiere)
Sundance Selects has acquired the US rights to Phoenix
Playing Saturday, February 28 at Lincoln Center (http://www.filmlinc.com/films/on-sale/phoenix)
Blu-ray (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Blu-ray/dp/B00X7HEJDC?SubscriptionId=AKIAIY4YSQJMFDJATNBA&tag=bluraycom-21&linkCode=xm2&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00X7HEJDC&m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE) from Soda Pictures (UK) on August 18, 2015
Clip (http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/watch-exclusive-clip-from-phoenix-plus-6-minute-video-essay-about-christian-petzolds-films-20150724) and The Playlist's review (http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/review-christian-petzolds-phoenix-will-take-your-breath-away-20150724)
Currently playing at IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in NY, opens 7/31/15 at Laemmle's Royale in LA. Slow theatrical expansion to follow.
I am so in love with this movie. The story unfolds to the rhythms of American cinema from the 40s and 50s . It's emotionally affecting but also intellectually engaging, and honest to god pulls one of the most astonishing and beautiful endings I can remember in several years, maybe ever. The last few minutes gave me full body chills.
Nina Hoss is one of the greatest actresses on the planet right now and delivers what I think is her best Petzold performance. She conveys so much through her physicality and the way she moves. _Every_little_thing_ is deliberate and paid careful attention to in Phoenix. You can feel Petzold invested in the details and the second to second progression of moments in the same way you feel PT invested in the design of The Master or Inherent Vice. Different style but equal care. This will go down as one of the best of the decade in my book.
Edit - Just learned that Nina Hoss starred opposite Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man, which so far I haven't been able to bring myself to watch. I'm still hesitant, but seeing those two in the same room may put me over the edge
just got back from this. what a tremendous, devastating film. so deceptively simple and ingeniously conceived, and executed to perfection. it has that invaluable quality of dramatizing its ideas rather than simply stating them (as kubrick once said of kieslowski). it confidently boasts a mastery of the craft on every level in a quiet, unassuming manner that only makes the power of the film reverberate for that much longer. not a single wasted frame. nina hoss gives one of the best performances i've ever seen.
fassbinder would have been envious of this film. films like this restore hope for the cinema. it's turning out to be quite the year for the medium. three that i've seen so far (this now being one of them) strike me as being revelatory works and among the best of the new decade. if any upcoming releases come anywhere near matching the greatness of this film i'll be a pig in shit.
Quote from: samsong on August 11, 2015, 02:49:33 AMit's turning out to be quite the year for the medium. three that i've seen so far (this now being one of them) strike me as being revelatory works and among the best of the new decade.
what are the other two?
i know for sure inside out is one of the two.
the duke of burgundy & mad max: fury road.
loved inside out but if i'm being honest, i tend to compartmentalize pixar movies in the context of cinema and consider them comfort food... reductive and probably unfair, but it is what it is.
alright well I saw inside out again and I'm convinced it's a goddamn masterpieces pixar's best, and one the year's decade's best.
Phoenix is fucking amazing and everyone should see it. still thinking about it.
this is a five star film.
i still have chills and a lump in my throat.
Samsong and wilder did an excellent job of reviewing this already, but I'll add my support.
My initial concern was that this couldn't be that interesting. Why would it be impossible to convince your husband that you were his wife, even if you looked different? I couldn't have been more off base. My concerns were laid to rest and how.
This is such a complex investigation of identity, love, betrayal, etc. Indeed, as Sam mentioned, these are fully dramatized--not merely hinted at.
It builds and builds to the final scene--I cried and cried and then I smiled all day.
it's crushing at the box office fwiw. it's been on la's west side for four or more weeks and that keeps driving me crazy (because i want it in hollywood, preferably sundance for $6 tuesdays)
Phoenix (2015) IFC $2,048,182
Thank you guys for really talking this one up. I spent the day by myself and went to this at the end of the night, something I haven't done since forever. Every little detail inspires. I'm also glad that this is a longer thread than so many of the so called hot movies out there right now. God bless this forum.
just saw it again. love it so much.
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Now on Netflix and iTunes
I mean you guys said this was good and stuff and I rarely if ever disagree with a Pete reco so I watched it yesterday and FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK it's really freakin good. Maybe my second favorite of the year behind Mad Max. This was such a welcomed and needed respite from Oscar-baity movies that try way too hard. What an elegant, economical slow-burn of a movie. So confident and fully realized. Nina Hoss deserves to be nominated for all the things.
God that ending.
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April 26, 2016 (http://www.criterion.com/films/28851-phoenix)
SPOILERS
So I was between Phoenix and Son of Saul yesterday and the raves around here convinced me to go with Phoenix. And I guess I lack faith because I couldn't buy for a second the premise of this film.
The moment Johnny says to her "you gotta pretend to be my wife" I felt a huge letdown and could never recover from it. I was like "this is what it's going to be about?" and sure enough it was. Sorry but even in a complete fantasy like this you gotta set some standards. The film asks you to believe that she sounds the same, walks the same, looks kind of the same, smells the same, all the same and this guy, HIS HUSBAND, never even doubts about anything? Are you guys married? You learn to recognize the breathing of your spouse, dudes.
And she spends half of the movie asking questions that wouldn't help at all in her supposed quest for truth: "did you use to take walks?", "how did you meet"?. Yeah I get it, she's enjoying it because she is feeling herself again after the horrors of war...a very convoluted and contrived explanation for everything that happens.
I also kept waiting for all the twist and turns, and "Hitchcock" atmosphere and master cinematic touches. There are not that many twists. the only twist you have to keep accepting is that johnny is such a dumb, money obsessed, guilt ridden guy he can't conceive the idea that the woman in front of him is his wife, despite the fact she becomes more and more transparent about it as the film goes on. The only "hitchcock" stuff is the tired Vertigo reference of changing hair color and the guy obsessively giving her instructions on how to behave. I just didn't find the style as enjoyable to let myself go with the flow of the implausible premise.
It all feels way too calculated to deliver that ending. A nice touch, but not enough to imprint the whole film with meaning. It elicits a "moving" response in the audience, but it feels fake.
It feels like you're rejecting the premise of the film, which is hard to debate. most films will ask the audience to accept one thing as true, then operates on that assumption. Phoenix is no exception, but it unfolds in way, like a Hitchcock film, in which the premise might not unfold until the second act. I also know some folks here and there who, like you, can't accept the premise - it just seems like you're trying to hang other flaws onto your inability to accept the premise, but they don't really exist beyond the context of the premise. You've even admitted to understanding the characters' motivations - how each is blinded by the trauma/ guilt of surviving the war - but then you write them off as contrived. I dunno - just because you can say you reject the premise in six or seven ways does not mean there are six or seven things, or even one thing wrong with the film.
it's not what's wrong with the film it's what's wrong with us watching it, yes, just as someone liking the movie is as important as the fact that someone likes the movie. liking this movie creates a better conversation but i don't believe for one second that it makes anyone a better person. i'm with Alexandro, 100% actually. if the movie doesn't puncture your guts and spread into your blood it doesn't.
Quote from: pete on April 27, 2016, 01:23:30 AM
It feels like you're rejecting the premise of the film, which is hard to debate. most films will ask the audience to accept one thing as true, then operates on that assumption. Phoenix is no exception, but it unfolds in way, like a Hitchcock film, in which the premise might not unfold until the second act. I also know some folks here and there who, like you, can't accept the premise - it just seems like you're trying to hang other flaws onto your inability to accept the premise, but they don't really exist beyond the context of the premise. You've even admitted to understanding the characters' motivations - how each is blinded by the trauma/ guilt of surviving the war - but then you write them off as contrived. I dunno - just because you can say you reject the premise in six or seven ways does not mean there are six or seven things, or even one thing wrong with the film.
of course if the premise doesn't work, a lot of other things won't. just because I can see the mechanics of a character's behavior doesn't mean I think the film pulled them off convincingly. even if it's contrived it could work, but the film pretty much asks you to take a lot of questionable stuff at face value. I had to go "mmmmm ok" every ten minutes when something else that I couldn't totally buy happened.
Did Christian Petzold leave a MAJOR FLAW in this film?
My wife & I loved this movie, totally had us hooked from beginning.
The movie has at least one very confusing 'doesn't-make-sense' flaw, about which I'd love to question director Christian Petzold...but I can't access him. So if anyone reading this has the answer, love to hear from you.
The whole plot is based around concentration-camp survivor Nelly and her estranged husband Johnny, who doesn't recognize her (due to facial reconstruction) when she returns to Berlin. Yes, that's already a big stretch. All she'd have to do is mention to him, any 5 things only the real Nelly would know, and he'd know it was her, face change or not. But she plays along with his supposed lack of recognition, partly to see if he betrayed her to the Nazis, partly to see if she can rekindle their marriage, and, in the process, some of her sense of identity.
The subplot is that he sees an opportunity to "train" this similar-but-not-really Nelly to play her and then co-opt her war inheritance. But the key piece of evidence that Nelly's friend leaves behind to prove he betrayed her is his writ of divorce, executed the day she was arrested and sent to the camps.
WAIT! If he legally divorced her, he is no longer married or related to her in any way...meaning he has absolutely no claim to any portion of her inheritance. Even though she doesn't know about the divorce till the end, he knows he divorced her, all along. He knows this makes her money unavailable to him, all along. So why does he ever bother to train her and cook up this elaborate ruse, that, if she succeeds, could only result in her getting a big inheritance and him getting nothing, nada?!
Unless he's planning to somehow steal it from her bank account, or at gunpoint, after she receives it, he knows they are divorced and he has nothing coming to him. So, recognizing her or not, aside, he would never bother to work on this one minute with her.
The are several other "oh, come ON!" junctures in this film, but that one was the most glaring, and pretty much ruins the line of reasoning of the whole plot. Anybody clearly see something I'm not "recognizing?"
I follow your logic and yeah admittedly that does seem like a pretty gaping plot hole.
But at the same time, it serves the emotion of the story, which as samsong put, is so ingeniously conceived, that I can forgive this. The movie already takes place in a world of artifice. Petzold himself said that audiences who can't buy into the heightened premise are people who "don't like movies", or don't like to suspend disbelief for some greater reward. This is a bit defensive and I can't write off anyone who the movie didn't work for, but at the end of the day I think the end that the plot is a means to is so great that overlooking logical flaws in a movie like this is worth it. It's a bit like cutting for performance instead of perfect continuity. Would I rather have perfect continuity between shots instead of the greatest possible performance? No. Would I rather have an airtight, completely logically progressing plot in lieu of a setup that engenders sky-high emotions? Definitely not.
I also think that the realistic style betrays the fact that the movie is a melodrama. The presentation creates expectations of naturalistic consequences, but the movie isn't that, which is part of what makes it so interesting. How often do we see melodrama play out in such a gritty, so realistically realized world? Tonally, it's something new.
Quote from: wilder on May 04, 2016, 07:15:43 PM
Would I rather have perfect continuity between shots instead of the greatest possible performance? No. Would I rather have an airtight, completely logically progressing plot in lieu of a setup that engenders sky-high emotions? Definitely not.
C'mon Wilder, no reason you can't have both...as so many of the films mentioned in this forum have managed to achieve.
But I agree the performances and tense emotions set up by Petzold, the actors, et al, were absolutely riveting. As I said, my wife & I LOVED the film, and I gave it a 5-star review on Netflix, in spite of the gaping plot hole.
Really, one wonders why Petzold and/or the screenwriters ever entered the whole divorce thing in the first place.
First off, it doesn't offer conclusive proof Johnny betrayed her to the Nazis. He divorced her the day she was arrested. He could have done that simply because he felt certain she would die & he'd never see her again, so end the marriage and be done with it, be free for the future.
Secondly, any intelligent screenwriters could have come up with at least a dozen other forms of proof or pieces of paper they could have Nelly come upon, that proved he betrayed her, other than something that so completely rules out him being a beneficiary, like divorce papers. Think, guys!
Lastly, by the time they introduced "divorce" as the 'big reveal,' it just doesn't compute and most watchers will go, "WTF?" Why would he divorce her on the day of capture? Lene says he was captured first, and the Nazis only agreed to release him if he betrayed Nelly. Did they also insist he rush to execute a full writ of divorce on the same day? Why?? And if the Nazis already had him, why would they want to switch out and drag her to the camps instead of him? As a common singer, was she somehow a more valuable prisoner?
I know, I know, just stick with the tense emotions and great performances. Just enjoy it and don't over-analyze it. We did enjoy it, but I do both...and if there's too many "Huh's???" piling up, it can make a bad movie out of a potentially good one, and even turn a great one into just so-so, when you start thinking about how easily they could have righted the ship and still had all the greatness remain.
You make many great points. I get upset when my girl is slapped, even when she deserves it.
i personally know absolutely nothing about german divorce law in the 40s, but understand divorce in narrative fiction to carry significant emotional and moral weight, especially if it isn't mutual. an abject declaration of the loss of love. so in that sense i don't have a problem at all simply going with it when divorce papers are offered as evidence of betrayal. lene also fucking killed herself in revealing it so that casts out any doubt i have that it isn't damning evidence.
as for it not really clicking with johnny's scheme, he's an incredibly selfish character living in postwar destitution, so that idea of it being hairbrained isn't tough to buy. either that or he's counting on the miracle of her being alive to skirt the issue of legality, hence the intense vetting process to make her as convincing as possible. and if that is the case, my ignorance of german divorce law also applies to my knowledge of their judicial system at large.
i don't think it's the goatse-level plot hole it's being made to be, but even if it is... who cares. i get that getting hung up on a detail like that can tarnish the experience a bit, but to quote hitchock, "it's only a movie." i can't for the life of me think of a single movie in existence that doesn't have something about it that someone can find narratively objectionable or consider a plot hole. i was too caught up in being moved and impressed to let potential plot weaknesses get in the way, especially because it doesn't miss a beat emotionally. and anything that gets me to that ending and to have it stick the way it does, i'm not trying to poke holes in.
see i was caught up in "i'm only human"
Yes, we all have different minds that work in different ways.
Samsong, I respect the fact that, the way you mind works, if the movie is riveting and irresistible to the end, you don't get caught up in details that don't follow. I just seem to have one of those minds that question obvious gaps in logic, even as I'm being entertained by a great story and atmospheric movie.
This is especially true when the movie is being made by a highly-skilled director and team of writers. It's obvious, when watching "Phoenix," that Petzold and his crew are of above-average intelligence. You simply couldn't make a movie this amazing and not have tremendous smarts. That's where it galls for me, or where I don't buy any "It's just a movie" defense from the director. Because if you are obviously that smart, how could you not see this, care about it enough, and take the few extra minutes or hours with your crew to say, let's fix this, let's get it right, let's offer another piece of paper or another more plausible angle? It would not have been a big deal for smart people to change this before final cut. So I can only see it as lazy.
i'm not giving it a pass, because i don't really think it's a plot hole or a fault in logic. i can see where your view of it goes in the direction that it does but i think i offered an alternative view on the matter that's just as valid, if not just as purely speculative. your take on the the issue of divorce and it negating his motive is contingent on things unfolding in a certain way after what's being shown in the film. so if it's a matter of using your imagination to fill in gaps in such a way that renders the thing "illogical, and therefore wrong/lazy", why not use your imagination to fill in the gaps so that it fits? either way it takes the same amount of thinking outside of what's presented in the film to go in one direction or the other.
i honestly never really thought of any of this when i saw the film and i'm addressing all of this not having seen it for several months, because i think everything that goes down in the movie is true to its characters. it wasn't like i was watching the movie and thought to myself, "oh man, divorce?! that really doesn't make any sense, but it's just a movie so whatever." hence my chiming in in the first place, because i don't think it's a big deal and i don't think you have as strong a case against the movie's supposed laziness as you think you do. at the end of the day though i doubt either of us is going to convince the other of anything so this is the last i have to say about any of it.
alright i lied. last thing. started going through the film again on netflix and there's a scene early on where we first see johnny being chased out of the records office. when lene goes through the files that were left on the floor she finds the writ of divorce. pretty clear implication to me that he's there to retrieve that document and that, in retrospect, it has something to do with claiming the inheritance. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
wilder, your girl didn't deserve to get slapped. if anything she's more beautiful now than she was then. and criterion's cover for this is one of their best, ever.
wait - I thought inheritance can and do go to ex's?
I get your point Alexandro but as I saw it it wasn't about failing to recognize your wife, it's about refusing to recognize her because the implications of her being alive and there were too major for him to compute and entertain.
I don't really remember at this point, so I can't be sure, but I don't think I ever felt this ambivalence on Johnny's part. The idea of refusing to recognise her would demand that we sense some kind of doubt, or at least a certain uncomfortability from him, particularly as she becomes more and more open with him and more like herself when with him. But I don't think that happens in the movie because he seems completely oblivious and fully engaged in the money and the scam up until the very end. In fact now that you mention it, I feel is one opportunity missed from the film.
I don't know. The only other two films I remember now that deal with face reconstruction are Face/Off and The Face of Another, and I had no problems buying any of the intrigues and insanely illogical things that happened there.
Understandable and I get that would require a certain amount of buying into it but I didn't have a problem with that. To be honest I wouldn't even mind if we were supposed to think Johnny was oblivious to it on a subconscious level too. All it had to do for me was make emotional sense.