TRIBUTES AND RETROSPECTIVES

Christian Petzold

Phoenix

Christian Petzold
2014 - Germany / Poland - 1h38

Screenings : thursday 25 - 10:30 pm - 400 Coups - 5 saturday 27 - 11:00 am - 400 Coups - 5

June 1945. Auschwitz survivor Nelly Lenz is seriously disfigured. After plastic surgery on her face, she combs the ruins of Berlin in search of her husband, Johnny. But Johnny doesn't recognise her. He asks her to impersonate his (presumed) dead wife so as to obtain her inheritance.

“After the Stasi years in Barbara, Petzold goes back a bit further in time to evoke the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Nazis. And like most of his previous films, it is the face of the wonderful actress Nina Hoss whom he turns to to materialise the most intimate shudders of history. (…) Although the film may seem to be Petzold's most conventional in terms of the academic canon of a historical reconstitution tinged with melodrama, there is, like Hitchcock's Madeleine, like the natural face of Nina Hoss meant to represent the changed face of Nelly, something of an illusion. Phoenix is less a costume drama than a revisiting of historical representations and mythologies, which gracefully spin out and redeploy figures and decors drawn from film fantasy – screaming Bob Fosse's Cabaret, the emblem of the pre-war decay, retraced in a blurred climate of unreality.” (Julien Gester; Libération)

CAST AND CREW

Cast : Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf, Trystan Pütter, Michael Maertens
Screenplay : Christian Petzold, Harun Farocki
Cinematography : Hans Fromm
Editing : Bettina Böhler
Music : Stefan Will

Production : Schramm Film Koerner & Weber

French distributor : Diaphana