Miroirs No. 3 Review

Christian Petzold's House of Mirrors

By: Marc Kozak

Miroirs No. 3

Christian Petzold's House of Mirrors

By: Marc Kozak

Christian Petzold is a real filmmaker’s filmmaker, a crafter of elegant, small-scale character dramas that leave the viewer feeling as if they have stumbled across some kind of profound and fundamental truth. His meticulously-controlled scripts are deceptively simple – so much so that you might find yourself anxiously anticipating some kind of spectacular or even supernatural reveal that never comes. It’s a style that has made the German director one of the most celebrated yet underdiscussed auteurs in all of Europe. If you’re reading a list of the best movies of the 2010s or even the 21st century, you’re almost always going to find one of his movies on it, usually Transit or Phoenix (or both). And yet, unjustly, none of his movies have ever made more than a few million dollars at the box office. Life as an arthouse filmmaker is often unfair.

Miroirs No. 3, Petzold’s latest, is even more scaled back than usual. A clearly unhappy young woman named Laura, played by Petzold’s frequent muse Paula Beer, is on a trip to Berlin with her inconsiderate boyfriend and another couple. She asks to be driven back home, and her boyfriend angrily obliges, only to crash the car and get himself killed. Laura miraculously survives and is found by a middle-aged woman named Betty (Barbara Auer) who lives in a country home near the accident site. Laura asks the woman if she can stay there for a while to recover, and Betty happily accepts, clearly thrilled to have someone around her lonely home.

As Laura and Betty start to form a tight bond, it becomes pretty apparent that something strange is going on. Betty’s home seems to exist in a perpetual state of disrepair, with every appliance and household object on the verge of going kaput. Neighbors start to stop in the street to gawk in front of Betty’s home, whispering in troubled tones. Betty’s ex-husband and adult son soon visit for dinner and are clearly disturbed by the fact that Betty has taken in a new housemate. “She’s not taking her medication again,” they tensely note when they return to the nearby auto garage where they work.

" Like the story of Tom Sawyer painting the fence, which is recounted literally and metaphorically early in the movie, sometimes you need to tell a lie in order to motivate change.  "

Still, as the days go on, a new family unit starts to take shape. Betty’s stone-faced ex-husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) starts to spend more time around the house, fixing broken appliances and wandering off to be alone with Betty. Their son Max (Enno Trebs) clearly has misgivings about why exactly Laura is still sticking around but eventually begins to soften and spend more time with her. Family dinners become livelier, full of laughter and easier conversation. It’s as if Laura is the missing piece that was needed to bring this broken family back together, even if there is still something unspoken lingering over the tentative happiness.

None of this is particularly thrilling per se, but Petzold withholds just enough information to give an edge of mystery and uneasiness to the proceedings. Laura is almost a complete unknown, and Beer is right at home in a role that requires her to say more with her glances and furrowed brow than her words. We slowly start to understand the ways in which she is lost, feeling a little guilty that she doesn’t feel worse about her bad boyfriend dying, not close to any friends or family in particular, and feeling uninspired about her studies in classical piano. Staying with Betty seems to be a no-pressure way to take some time to breathe and figure things out.

Petzold doesn’t use much in the way of background music in his movies, so when he uses a song, it’s usually for a good reason. The movie’s title refers to the third movement of the piano suite Miroirs by Maurice Ravel, which means “mirrors” in French – appropriate for our two central women characters who are feeling similar aches of loss and a desire for love. The more memorable usage of music is "The Night" by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, a song that just happens to come up on a playlist when Laura pays Max a visit in the auto garage. The song’s lyrics bask in the joy of a new love but also preach caution: “But the night begins to turn your head around / And you know you're gonna lose more than you've found.”

It’s a call for caution that comes with good reason, especially once all of the family’s secrets are finally revealed. It’s a mystery that turns out not to be much of a mystery at all – those like me who found themselves holding space for a supernatural twist of reincarnation will have to contain their disappointment. Instead, it’s a move that takes its cues from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, as characters try to replace people that they miss with someone who closely resembles them. Each of the two women are a quick fix for what’s haunting the other, but it’s a dangerous and thin line between relief and an even greater anguish.

In the end, Miroirs No. 3 is a simple story about a small group of characters retreating into an illusion in an effort to heal their pain. Like the story of Tom Sawyer painting the fence, which is recounted literally and metaphorically early in the movie, sometimes you need to tell a lie in order to motivate change. Petzold ends on an optimistic note, suggesting that even though the truth will eventually come out and cause further pain, it still may have had a net-positive result.

It’s not the most spectacular story, but this is what Petzold does: he points the camera at characters who are doing their best to survive life’s mundane perils. His camera lens continues to serve as one of the sharpest cinematic mirrors to the universal human experience. Miroirs No. 3 isn’t his greatest work, but its reflections still quietly linger long after the final frame.