[리뷰] An allegory woven by Christian Petzold set in Berlin before and after “Phoenix”

The 2014 film directed by Christian Petzold, which made an extraordinary landing in theaters last year with and , will be released in Korean theaters this year. opens with a picture of a woman entering the German border with bandages all over her face and bloodied. Shortly after WWII, Jewish singer Nelly (Nina Hoss), a survivor of a gunshot wound to the face in Auschwitz, returned to Berlin for plastic surgery. According to news from her friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf), her entire family has passed away and her husband, pianist Johnny (Ronald Gerfeld), filed for divorce shortly after his wife was taken to a concentration camp and has faded away. Nelly, who is constantly searching for her husband, eventually finds Johnny at the ‘Phoenix’ nightclub, but Johnny does not recognize Nelly. Without even feeling the fullness of his grief, Johnny asks “Nelly, who looks like Nelly” to pretend his wife has come back alive. In front of her violent husband, Nelly finally decides to play her own role.

rolls with two axes of loose anxiety and mystery. First, the question arises as to whether the fake game will continue to function effectively and to what kind of conclusion the stacked misunderstandings will lead. The second is circumstantial doubts as to whether a pre-Holocaust non-Jewish husband tried to survive on his own by blaming his wife. After fine-tuning the look and reimagining the story in the camp as Johnny requested, Nelly achieved an almost identical state to herself before the Holocaust. In the process, Johnny’s claim of betraying his wife grows stronger, but Phoenix protects the Abyss without revealing the secrets of whoever stays with her husband in the end. Nellie sometimes even feels jealous of her husband’s concern for herself.

with a rather dramatic premise is an allegory woven by Christian Petzold in post-war Berlin. So what needs to be examined is the form of love belief, or obsession, that Nellie, the main character, has long harbored in this melodramatic film. Johnny plans a mock performance to welcome Nelly back from the concentration camp to the train station, and tries to dress Nelly in a gorgeous red dress, but Nelly doesn’t try to convince Johnny how impossible it is in reality, but later realizes the cool gap between the two.

Those who survived the collapsed city and those who came back alive. turns the conversation between the two from a love affair to a moral one. Just as Nelly’s face was “reconstructed” from the same place on the body but in a completely different form, the people of post-war Berlin are required to live as different people than before.

Director Christian Petzold, who calls himself the Berlin School with Angela Chanelek (I Wars at Home, Friends) and Thomas Aslan (Holidays), based on World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the identity confusion experienced by the Germans. He is a writer obsessed with the feeling of loss and loss. It deals with the microscopic daily life of ordinary people with a mixture of realism and gender touch, and in , a black image is added to the melodrama frame.

The way in which Petzold places the characters between light and dark is also remarkable. The protagonist, whose face is covered with a black veil, mostly wanders the streets at night or stays in a dark basement. The damp darkness that enveloped the faceless woman turns into a bright light at the end of the movie, and only then does the movie end it. A work that announces the heyday of Christian Petzold, pioneer of a new frontier in German cinema, with the dark shadow of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the reason for the incomprehension that Alfred Hitchcock loved. It’s a movie that will excite critics, but it’s full of beauty that is purely evocative, even without any information on the subject or the aesthetic.

CHECKPOINT

nina pipe

Before Paula Bear, there was Nina Horse. Nina Hoss, who collaborated with director Christian Petzolt on (2012) and , plays Holocaust survivor Nelly, who tries to restore her parched inner life in memories of the past. In a scene where Nelly recounts horrific memories of her experiences in the concentration camp in front of Johnny, the scene is dazzling with Nina Hoth’s complex and compelling portrayal of the character’s dual position.

historical trilogy

, the story of a woman who tries to escape from East Germany to join her lover in West Germany, , which is between , which straddles the air raids of WWII and the refugee problem of today, is It depicts the process of a woman wearing a hoodie embracing a new way of life in post-war Berlin in a pitiful way. The strange beauty of Petzolt’s film, which unfolds issues of love and identity in a historical maze, is evident in all three films.

maybe the best ending

deserves to be remembered as a powerful ending among Petzold’s films. It is a scene where the German musician Kurt Weil will hum the famous song for a long time left in the American jazz scene.