Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3
Share
“It’s a ghost story, you’re right,” Christian Petzold tells an interviewer for Directors’ Fortnight. Literally or metaphorically? In Yella (2007), a woman survives a car crash and walks through the rest of the film in a reality adjacent to our own. In Miroirs No. 3, Petzold’s first film to screen in Cannes, Laura (Paula Beer) is in a red convertible racing through the countryside, and for a brief moment, she locks eyes with Betty (Barbara Auer), a woman dressed in black and painting a white picket fence. “She is chosen, like in a fairy tale,” says Petzold.
Laura, a pianist studying in Berlin, has recently been plagued by dark thoughts. She’s first seen on a bridge, looking down as if contemplating putting an end to things. When she looks up, she “sees a standup paddler, an image reminiscent of Arnold Böcklin’s painting, The Isle of the Dead,” notes Petzold. “That is the first thing she perceives, death.”
Once that red convertible reaches its destination, Laura tells her boyfriend that she’s not up for a holiday and wants to go back to Berlin. And so, furious, he drives her back toward the train station, but along the way, Laura and Betty catch each other’s gaze a second time. Offscreen, the convertible flips. The boyfriend is instantly killed. Laura emerges from the wreckage unscathed.
Betty takes her in, and life is good. The two women cook and garden and paint together, and Betty happens to have a closet full of clothes that fit Laura perfectly. Betty’s estranged husband and son (Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs), who have been living at the workshop where they repair cars and tractors, begin spending more time at the house.
“As the story of Miroirs No. 3 unfolds with an intractable and wholly compelling internal logic,” writes Little White Lies’ David Jenkins, “Petzold gravitates towards a twist which is too signposted and obvious to have any real bearing on what the film is actually about.” But “no one, absolutely no one is doing it like Petzold. As with the titular Ravel piece, this is a work that is mellifluous, melodious, and mysterious in equal measure.”
Petzold’s work is shot through with “little mysteries that enrich, complicate, and abandon the story, filled out just too little to decipher, their ghost left behind to taunt the viewer with loose connections and peculiar feelings,” writes Luke Hicks at the Film Stage. “On paper they simply suggest plot holes, but under the direction of Petzold’s unique pace, mood, and tone, those mysteries have become the glitter and glue of his filmography.”
“Using only diegetic music and shot in a crisp, unfussy style, with a preponderance of soft, natural light, the film is as spare and elegant as we have come to expect from Petzold,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney. “It’s a minor work for the director and its emotional heft feels softer than usual, but even his lesser films can be compelling, and Beer is never less than transfixing.”
In Variety, Guy Lodge agrees that “this eighty-six-minute puzzle piece isn’t one of the director’s major works, but [it] is distinguished by his trademark pleasures of texture and tone—and pushes his ongoing collaboration with star Paula Beer into ever more enigmatic territory.” For Screen’s Wendy Ide, Miroirs No. 3 is “an exercise in economy, pared back to the barest of bones. Although it’s a wisp of a thing, it delivers rich rewards.”
Don’t miss out on your Daily briefing! Subscribe to the RSS feed.
