Christian Petzold’s beguiling and restorative new drama “Miroirs No. 3” begins with a glance and a car crash.
Wreckage and its long-term aftermath have long marked the movies of Petzold, arguably Germany’s foremost filmmaker. In his finest and most exquisitely haunting film, 2014’s “Phoenix,” an Auschwitz survivor and cabaret singer (Nina Hoss, colossally good) returns unrecognized to her German hometown with a reconstructed face, to a husband who’s said to have betrayed her to the Nazis.
“Miroirs No. 3” doesn’t have that film’s grandiosity of melodrama; it’s more of a lightly enigmatic chamber piece. But it’s likewise preoccupied with piecing life together again after tragedy, and maybe finding some catharsis in music. (The title comes from a Ravel piano piece.) And its startling power will, like “Phoenix,” sneak up on you.
Laura (Paula Beer, the star of Petzold’s “Undine” and “Transit”), a piano student from Berlin, is reluctantly riding in the backseat of a car. Our first glimpse of her, before this road trip, was staring blankly, maybe suicidally, into a river. With Laura is her musician boyfriend, Jakob (Philip Froissant) and a producer that Jakob is hoping to impress. As they drive through the countryside, Laura locks eyes with a solitary middle-aged woman standing outside her home. For a fleeting moment they share a mysterious connection, maybe of some shared strain of depression.
Soon after, Laura says she wants to return to Berlin and Jakob, annoyed, drives her to the nearest train station. But just after again passing the same woman’s house, they skid off the road in a wreck that kills Jakob and throws Laura from the car. The woman runs to help. After the paramedics arrive and treat a still dazed Laura, they’re surprised at her request. She asks if she can stay at the woman’s house, rather than go to the hospital.
What follows is a sweetly oblique, even dreamlike interlude of recuperation. But it’s not just Laura’s. It’s also healing for the woman who happily takes her in. Betty is her name, and Barbara Auer’s performance is as deft and delicate as any you’re likely to see this year. Their time together is spent not discussing their own traumas, but with soft, unspoken kindnesses and daily routine.
Petzold, who also wrote the script, is masterful at meting out backstory. He does it in a way that never feels like withholding to the audience or girding for a big twist, but remains tied to the psychology of his characters. As much as his films might ebb and flow with grief and recovery, their backbone is that of a thriller. Petzold, a great admirer of Hitchcock and “Vertigo,” in particular, makes movies where identity, rather than people, can go missing.
The source of Betty’s pain isn’t revealed until well into “Miroirs,” but it’s not hard to guess at. We learn that her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and their adult son Max (Enno Trebs) — auto mechanics who look skeptically on Laura’s arrival — live separate of Betty. Meanwhile, Betty gives Laura her daughter’s clothes to wear, and encourages her to play the piano her daughter used to. Together, they paint a fence and restore a herb garden.
Strange as their domestic life might seem, something warm and good is taking place. We have the feeling Richard and Max haven’t been around much, even though their shop is just a bike ride away. But the four soon begin to almost resemble a family unit. In a movie about two women who intuitively understand each other, Brandt and Trebs are charmingly oafish as men who are eager to fix a dishwasher but less keen on how to repair trauma.
That this idyll is bound to expire, sooner or later, goes without saying. But while another filmmaker might steer such a story toward either disaster or, more likely, schmaltz, Petzold ends “Miroirs” without sacrificing the ambiguous grace that came before. And he turns “Miroirs,” a slender and sweet 86-minute puzzle, into one of the more lovely and profound little movies about how hearts can be mended by just opening a door.
“Miroirs No. 3,” a 1-2 Special release in theaters, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 86 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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