GUILT & LOVE RISE FROM PHOENIX
Jews were well accepted in Protestant Germany for centuries and intermarried with Germans perhaps more than in any other country in Europe. Hitler’s purge of Jews was not easily accomplished, since offspring of mixed marriages had fractions of Jewish blood, so where was the line to be drawn? Phoenix raises a related question: What if Jewish women married Germans, changed their surnames to their husbands, and passed as Germans? What if German husbands were asked by authorities whether their rich wives were Jewish?
When the film begins, Nelly Lenz (played by Nina Hoss) is being transported by Lene Winter (Nina Kunzendorff), a close friend, from Auschwitz to the American sector of occupied Germany in 1945 with her head in bandages, presumably because her captors wanted to destroy a beautiful face. She learns that on October 4, 1944, her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) was arrested, interrogated, and released, but two days later she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, so the assumption is that he ratted on her to save his own skin. Lene wants her to move to Palestine, and has even picked out some possible apartments for her future residence. Meanwhile, the two live together. But first Nelly has an operation to restore as much of her former beauty as possible, which means that she ends up unrecognizable to her former friends and husband. Afterward, she seeks to claim her former wealth. Despite her friend’s warning, her love for Johnny compels her to seek him out at a cabaret named Phoenix. (But of course her re-emergence could be characterized as another type of phoenix.) When he spots her, he thinks she resembles Nelly enough so he can coach her to pose as his wife to reclaim her assets, and he offers a five-digit sum for her to carry out the charade. With the plot thus established, audiences will wonder when he will realize that he has actually found his wife, as Nelly refuses to let him know, and how he will react. Director Christian Petzold delays the answer to the last frames of the film, possibly the most gripping ever in the history of filmmaking. But what happens next? MH