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Miroirs No. 3

A single location drama like Afire, but this actually struck me as a return to the obscure, troubling, interpretively difficult pre-Barbara work, Ghosts trilogy especially. Paula Beer and her boyfriend get in a typically miraculous/mysterious Petzold car crash on a country road, the boyfriend is killed, and Beer is taken in by Barbara Auer where she becomes enmeshed in a family with a troubled history. So the setup for a torrid melodrama, which no one will be surprised to hear Petzold invests both with dramatic heft through intensely realistic details and with an atmosphere of the dreamlike and otherworldly through elisions and quiet improbabilities. Fraught interpersonal relationships, fuzzy and troubling motivations, symbols of transportation, and the nature of work and money figure in. As you'd expect.

Unlike their last three films, Petzold has given Beer a typical Nina Hoss role: opaque and reserved, not revealing much in terms of psychology. But Beer is more guileless than Hoss tended to play her roles, internalized but instinctual and unreflective where Hoss always seemed to be thinking. No, what really made it seem like a Hoss role is that finally Beer's character isn't circling a central male character. I don't mean that as a criticism, because Petzold has always avoided the kind of sexism that my description there suggests. But Petzold really centres Beer this time, and it's her relationship with the family that takes her in that defines the narrative. Unlike with Hoss, Petzold has tended to figure Beer as unknowable because otherworldly: as a ghost in Transit, a folklore figure in Undine, and a manic pixie dream girl in Afire (the latter is the most successful in this regard for how acutely is plays around with genre expectations and the flattened assumptions they lead to). But that's not the case here--or at least not in the same way. Beer's otherworldliness set her off from the characters in the other films, or at least from the main character, while here it's her relationship with Barbara Auer and the circumstances she finds herself in that's oddly unreal. Indeed, the elisions and narrative obscurities make Beer's character feel like she's been plunked into a movie suddenly, with only a dim connection to the life outside when the story begins. She wanders through it in something of a dazed state, and does so even before her car accident. One can posit both realistic and non-realistic reasons, but either way, Beer inhabits rather than is defined by the otherwordly atmosphere.

So where do I rank this in Petzold's filmmography? I'm...not sure. Afire I thought might well be his masterpiece, a film of considerable strength that both worked Petzold's usual themes and style while revealing things I hadn't seen from him before. Miroirs No. 3 is doing the opposite, it's going back towards an earlier mode. In that it holds fewer surprises, and with its short length and narrative simplicity, seems intended to be a minor work. Letterboxed seems to agree it's minor, anyway. My problem is that, like with Ghosts, I find it difficult on a first viewing to say what the film is ultimately doing. Sure, its narrative seems straightforward and predictable, but its opaqueness makes me wary, makes me think that Petzold is up to a lot more than strikes you on a first viewing. It's a subtle, audience repelling film in a lot of ways, and a quietly funny one (my screening's audience was wonderfully receptive to its jokes). And most fascinating is that despite being very short, it continues past its natural ending point to arrive at odd plot points I found hard to interpret. My instinct is that it doesn't stand with Afire, but is more cohesive than Transit. I think I might put it with Undine in the rather good but not a Petzold masterpiece category. Again, the movie puts its characters into easily interpretable roles, yet hides them under enough odd layers that I wonder if the film isn't considerably weightier than it comes across. I thought it was fascinating all through, anyway.

Tangential, but Barbara Auer is an unrecognized Petzold woman. Not hard to see why: of the features, she only starred in The State I am In and has minor roles in Yella and Transit. But she was also a main character in Petzold's three feature-length Polizeiruf 110 episodes. With all that and this new one, she has a greater presence in Petzold's filmmography than Julia Hummer. She is very good here: mysterious and layered, never overplaying things, always hitting the right balance. She delivers a monologue early in the film narrating an episode from Tom Sawyer that does this perfect highwire trick of revealing everything and nothing at the same time (seriously, the moment seems to give everything away while at the same time being totally misleading).

I think I agree with you in the placement of Miroirs no. 3 in Petzold's body of work, and that it feels like a return to the tone and themes of the Ghosts trilogy.

Spoiler

Laura's sudden appearance to a family driven apart by grief; her taking over of the dead daughter's room, clothes, and piano; and her very vaguely sketched past all make her a ghostly figure. Or perhaps some sort of interventionist angel, like Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life or Dudley in The Bishop's Wife, whose mission it is to set things right. She acts as a catalyst to bring the family back together and then, once that's accomplished, moves on.

It is a slight movie, no matter which way you look at it. Four characters, essentially, two primary locations: the house and the garage. 86-minute runtime. But I can see Petzold wanting to strip things down to the core with members of his repertory company after the comparatively complicated emotion and storyline of Afire. He seemed to do the same thing after Transit, taking the same two leads from their Kafkaesque nightmare and putting them in a dreamlike, two-hander fairy tale.

There is a "seven-film showcase" of Petzold's work, most of which is on 35mm, next week at Film Lincoln with Petzold in attendance at many of the events.

I have to say, it's quite a trip to see The State I Am In and then Miroirs No. 3 afterwards due to a particular scene. (It'll be obvious.)

Binging on a lot of Petzold this weekend really brings out the recurring motifs in his work. During a Q&A he even joked about one himself (which is relevant to what I wrote above), but the richest one for him involves people who take the place of the living or the missing. He brought up Hitchcock's Rebecca in relation to Miroirs No. 3 and I know he's talked in-depth about Vertigo in the past, but it's interesting to see him work the idea across his films - he goes back to that same kernel over and over again, cultivating an entirely different film each time out.

I know people here were really down on Yella, but even though it's not among my favorites, I actually liked it quite a bit. I don't get the impression that Petzold really cares about surprising people with "the big twist" - even though it's discussed with spoiler tags here, I noticed he openly discusses the obvious inspiration behind Yella in interviews and Lincoln Center's description blatantly identifies the movie as well. It's pretty easy to guess as the movie's playing, but since it was already told to me, it may have shaped how I watched the proceedings - instead of wondering whether it would go in that direction, I wondered how that idea was supposed to fit what was going on, and I think that made the film's political commentary sharper, at least for me.

Truth be told, I find business absolutely dull. Even though I'm interested in how business shapes the world, I'm bored to aggravation by how it works internally, and that's a large part of this movie. To Petzold's credit, it held my interest, but there were long stretches where it felt really dry even if I understood the drama or tension being put across. I guess one could argue that if you're going to comment on how this world changes people, you have to portray it convincingly. Regardless, aside from the more dramatic elements with the husband she left behind, the story does come together and build towards a damning observation of capitalism: the ruthless, sociopathic tendency to ruin someone for personal gain, and how this mentality shapes the way people value a person's worth (including their own).

In memory, the film plays like a moral tragedy, of someone who gets one second chance after another, each one coming on the heels of someone's moral or ethical failing. But in the end, she doesn't learn to be merciful, only merciless, and the big twist doesn’t play like a mere stunt but damnation that's earned, as if all those second chances were squandered and the fates decided she was beyond hope.

I love The State I'm In! I found Mirroirs to be the least successful of Petzold's films; there just wasn't much depth to it for me, and when it does start to unravel it ends quickly. I found Afire much more evocative.

And I really like Yella! Like in many of his films Petzold only uses the original Hollywood original as a base and point of reference, again taking it towards examining the post reunification Germany and the capitalistic overtake by bussiness (also at the heart of his debut Pilotinnen, and inspired by Farocki's Nothing Ventured). I love the whole trilogy really.

Also very worthy of watching are Something to Remind Me and Petzold's part in Dreileben: Beats Being Dead