Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3

Fortunately for Laura, Betty is no Annie Wilkes. She takes the reeling accident victim into her home, but she lets her leave anytime she wants (there will be no “hobbling” in this film). The dynamic is far from healthy, but it isn’t sinister. In fact, there might even be an outside chance for healing in director-screenwriter Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3, which opens this Friday in New York.

The premise is conducive for an amnesia mystery. Some descriptive marketing copy even suggests that Miroirs No. 3 contains thriller elements, but that is grossly misleading. However, Petzold is a skilled filmmaker, who clearly enjoys teasing his viewers with clues as to what his films are really and truly all about. That is particularly true in this case.

Laura is clearly in a funk. The piano student has conspicuously tired of her hipster boyfriend Jakob, so she sabotages his weekend party plans. Demanding he return her to the train station, he recklessly sped down Betty’s rural road, in an act of passive aggression that ultimately costs Jakob his life. Betty saw it all, and Laura saw her seeing it, wondering why the woman locked eyes on her so intently.

You don’t have to be Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound to recognize Betty’s signs of trauma. Her husband Richard and grown son Max moved out because they couldn’t face her borderline delusional behavior any longer, but they still keep tabs on her. Clearly, they worry Laura’s presence will make Betty worse. However, they also act super-awkward and solicitous around her.

If you haven’t figured out Miroirs No. 3 yet, maybe you never will. However, Petzold isn’t really trying fool anyone with a big surprise twist. He is much more interested in the characters’ extreme strategies for dealing with their traumas.

Music also plays an important role. In addition to Ravel’s titular movement, Dutch vocalist Mathilde Sating’s eerie rendition of “You Go to My Head” (which immediately prompts comparisons with Dimitri de Clerq’s much more mysterious and thrillerish amnesia film of the same title) and Frankie Valli’s “The Night” become important topics of conversation within the film.

Stella: A Life

Stella Goldschlag was Jewish and a jazz singer. In National Socialist Germany, that meant she had two very big strikes against her. Unfortunately, she dealt with her situation quite poorly, with a decidedly collaborationist strategy. She survived the war physically intact, but lost her soul, as viewers will witness during the course of Kilian Riedhof’s historically accurate biographical drama, Stella: A Life, which premieres today on VOD.

Their fans seem to think Goldschlag and her [almost entirely Jewish] swing band were hot stuff, but legit jazz listeners will be underwhelmed by her rendition of “Sing Sing Sing.” They will also be put off by her lack of compassion for fellow bandmates concerned about their imprisoned family members. Obviously, Goldschlag naively believes her blonde Aryan looks and her father’s WWI veteran status will protect her from the worst, but viewers know it won’t work that way.

The closing credits rightly assert Goldlschlag was both a victim and a collaborating perpetrator. It is easy to lose sight of that first part during Stella: A Life. Over the course of the early 1940s, she starts in denial, pivots to an exploitative role abetting her black marketeer lover, Rolf Isaakson, but then agrees to become the worst kind a collaborator when captured by the Gestapo.

In fact, Goldschlag herself volunteers to become a “catcher,” as they call the snitches they employ to ensnare other Jews. Initially, Goldschlag struggles to meet her quota, but she and the formerly reluctant Isaakson soon become quite good at it. Clearly, it helped sooth Goldschlag’s conscience thinking her betrayals would protect her parents. Yet, those promises turned out to mean absolutely nothing.

Riedhof’s film is very dark and in many ways quite demoralizing. Nonetheless, Goldschlag is an acutely human character and Paula Beer’s performance is truly fearless, because she never compromises or waters down the singer’s ruthless, manipulative, and self-centered persona. The way Beer shows Goldschlag clinging to her supposed victim status, despite all the pain she causes for her friends and neighbors really rings uncomfortably true. Indeed, had Goldschlag lived long enough, it is easy to envision her as one of the “as a Jew” “Anti-Zionists,” deliberately self-tokenizing herself, to curry favor with “Free Palestine” extremists (and in fact, Goldschlag later converted to Christianity and regularly expressed a virulent brand of anti-Semitism).

Petzold’s Undine

According to artistic and literary representations, Undine (or Ondine), the water nymph, is usually female and seductive. You wouldn’t expect them to be experts in GDR-era architecture and post-Unification urbanization, but Undine Wibeau certainly is. Just what her connection is to her namesake myth will be revealed over the course of Christian Petzold’s Undine, which releases this Friday in theaters and on VOD.

Wibeau has just been dumped by her faithless boyfriend Johannes and she is not dealing with it well. Providentially, her rebound, Christoph is right there in the audience of her latest museum lecture. She is almost too self-absorbed in her resentment and codependency to notice him, until fate explosively intervenes. Soon, she finds the sort of romantic relationship she always desired with Christoph, the industrial diver.

He is actually the one who makes his living from the water. In fact, he is eager to show her an old shipwreck that bears her name on its prow. Unfortunately, fate will intervene once again, forcing Wibeau to come to terms with her true self.

Petzold’s Undine is radically different from most mermaid/selkie films, but it would still make an intriguing pairing with Neil Jordan's Ondine, which its title brings to mind (both intriguingly riff off selkie/mermaid myths, without trotting out tail fins or tridents). Frankly, some reviews and synopses probably give away too much. It is better to go into Undine not knowing about as much as you might learn from this review.

If you do, Undine definitely engages on a deep level. It is not as powerful and moving as Petzold’s masterworks, Phoenix and Barbara, but it still ranks with them rather than his more cerebral films, such as Transit and Jerichow.

Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski (who also co-starred in Transit) have terrific (awkward in the right kind of way) chemistry as Wibeau and Christoph. Neither come across as blow-dried romantic leads, but that helps us take an emotional stake in their relationship. Jacob Matschenz and Maryam Zaree also have sizeable roles as Johannes and Monika, Christoph’s diving partner, but Beer and Rogowski completely outshine them.

Kino! ’18: Bad Banks (series)

Jana Liekam’s new employer is too big to like. Deutsche Global is one of Germany’s largest investment banks, but they have recently been thrown off-stride by scandals and bad investments. It represents a second chance for Liekam, who might just save the bank, so she can help destroy it later in the German limited series Bad Banks (trailer here), directed by Christian Schwochow, the first two episodes of which screen during this year’s KINO!: Festival of German Films in New York.

Liekam has just been fired from Luxembourg-based Credit International for making her boss, Luc Jacoby, the chairman’s coked-up, entitled son look bad. Christelle Leblanc, the firm’s director agrees this is unfair, but cautions Liekam she must learn to play the game better. Thanks to her secret string-pulling, she gets Liekam a tryout at Deutsche Global working for their hotshot investment manager Gabriel Fenger. From time to time, Lebanc will supply Liekam with timely “insider” information, but she makes it clear she wants highly compromising information on Credit International in return.

Judging from the in media res opening, the junk bonds will eventually hit the fan in a big, panic-inducing way. Presumably, Liekam will play a major role in the meltdown. Obviously, there is a lot of intrigue building behind the scenes, but the first two episodes are relatively self-contained, thereby making a good festival showcase.

Paula Beer (so terrific in Ozon’s Frantz) is well cast as Liekam. She can be quite forceful and even cynical, but it is clear from her early breakdown, she probably has issues that will later come to the fore. Barry Atsma is also wonderfully flamboyant as Fenger, a true child of Gordon Gekko. May Duong Kieu also makes quite an impression as Thao Hoang, Liekam’s new team-member, who will either be her uneasy ally or a femme fatale rival, or something in between (just how their relationship shakes out will be one of the series’ intriguing uncertainties). Marc Limpach is a clammy mess as Jacoby the younger, but Jean Marc Barr promises plenty of steely skullduggery as Deutsche Global’s chairman, Robert Khano.

Schwochow, a veteran of both film and television, helms with style, hooking viewers right from the start. He lays a good deal of groundwork in the first two episodes, yet still manages to end each one in quite a satisfying manner. Hopefully, MHz or someone will pick up Bad Banks, because it is really smart and addictive television. Until then, the first two episodes are highly recommended when they screen this Saturday (4/7) and next Thursday (4/12), as part of KINO! 2018 in New York City.