Arash AziziShortly into Christian Petzold’s Mirros No. 3, which premiered at Cannes’ Directors Fortnight side section, we get a sense that this is a Petzoldian film. The auteur German director has mastered a style, immediately recognizable to his admirers: a haunting sentiment often created by wordless pauses, a forceful character challenging assumptions about emotions, the rehabilitative potential of art. If you are a Petzold fan, you feel like you are in for a treat.
It helps that the lead is played by Paula Beer, a perfect partner for Petzold (Transit, Undine, Afire), without whom is impossible to imagine the director’s work in recent years. Here she plays Laura, a musical student who faces a terrible road crash outside Berlin and finds refuge at the nearest house, the suburban villa of Betty (Barbara Auer.) She is not hurt badly and will be allowed to leave but, to Betty’s surprise, she says she likes to stay there if she doesn’t mind. In no time, we find her feeling at home. Playing an old piano at the house, wearing clothes of an old resident, even making Konigsberg dumplings, a favorite dish of Betty’s husband and son (Richard played by Matthias Brandt and Max played by Enno Trebs) who are a bit disturbed by her sudden entry into their lives.
Petzold’s films are often driven by a haunting sense of mystery but here there is little left to imagination here. Upon meeting Laura, Betty mistakenly calls her by a different name and we can easily guess why. She was mother to a young woman, a pianist like Laura, who she’s recently lost. Her affection for Laura is a rather convenient attempt to replace her lost daughter. No wonder Richard and Max are disturbed. Soon Laura will be too.
At 86 minutes long, the film can be considered short and sweet. It appears that Petzold has captured the basic elements of his style and attempted to make a poignant film with them, bared down to the basics and without much elaboration. But the result is less than convincing. The ‘old mother looks to replace a lost daughter’ story line is hackneyed and doesn’t allow much room for genuine emotional exploration. The most fascinating encounters are the film are thus not between Laura and Betty but between Laura and the two men, a recurring Petzoldean theme of people of the art meeting those from common walks of life. Classical music is not just there as an ornament and works elegantly as a story background. The film’s title refers to a famed work by Maurice Ravel which Laura loves to play and Betty loves to listen to; once more for easily guessable reasons. Beer excels in her portrayal of the enigmatic lead and masterly performs her uneasy relationship to her seemingly comfortable and bourgeois life in Berlin. But the film seems to need something more to elevate it and it never quite finds it.
Despite their common characteristic style, Petzold’s films also showcase an impressive range. Undine wraps a romantic drama around a tasteful allusion to its titular myth. Afire is effortlessly funny, its comedic qualities rivaling the best of Woody Allen’s satire of intellectuals and their pretensions. Transit, one of my favorite films, manages to be both a Second World War drama and a moving mediation on ephemerality of human relationship. I see it as a poetic post-note to Casablanca. What’s missing in Mirros No. 3 is perhaps that extra scaffolding, something on which the Petzoldean instincts can hang themselves.
Despite these shortcomings, Petzold shows he’s built an impressive style and Beer remains an indispensable partner for his cinema. Together the duo have reimagined contemporary German cinema, making a strong case for the 21st century Berlin School as distinctive. However, it was Mascha Schilinksi’s Sound of Falling that featured in the competition this year and even won the Jury Prize, showcasing a very different dialect of German cinema.
