Review: Miroirs No. 3

Director:  Christian Petzold

Stars:  Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Enno Trebs

At the beginning of Christian Petzold’s slippery Miroirs No. 3, Berlin music student Laura (Paula Beer) looks over a bridge at the waters below, and one can’t help but wonder in the moment if she is contemplating suicide. In the next scene she views the same body of water from the shore, and a standing paddler passes, as if to evoke the ferryman on the River Styx. As the film’s modest titles play over the undulating water, a disquiet lands on the surface of the film that never quite washes away.

Laura suffers an extraordinary accident out in the countryside not long after. Intending to go away with friends, a feeling of general malaise and unwellness comes over her, and her boyfriend Jakob (Philip Froissant) is tasked with driving her back to the station. The drive takes her back passed a lone woman painting her country home’s picket fence white, where we sense an uncanny inference of kinship or recollection. It is only moments later that Jakob crashes the car, killing himself and leaving Laura lying prone but mostly unharmed in a field.

The nearby woman, Betty (Barbara Auer), rushes to the scene and takes Laura in, setting her up in a spare room, where she remains to recuperate long after the emergency services have tended to the accident site. Through an unspoken tacit understanding, Laura has made herself at home in a contract that serves both women. A slip of the tongue reveals the name Yelena, and it seems pretty clear that Laura’s stay is filling a void for Betty, while she herself reels from the sudden trauma of her close call.

Except it’s not quite as straightforward as that. Dressed in the clothes of a departed loved one, playing the dead girl’s piano, Laura dutifully plays her role, just as Nina Hoss’ Nelly did for her treacherous husband in Petzold’s high-water mark Phoenix. But she shrugs off significant emotional attachment to Jakob. Her need to be there is less clear, and grows more complicated when Betty’s husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and son Max (Enno Trebs) return home.

The rural property is in a state of disrepair. The dishwasher keeps breaking, bicycles aren’t fit for purpose. Only Betty’s treatment of the picket fence belies any notion of renovation or rectification of the state of rot that has come over the household. Laura brings modest domestic luxury to the family, treating them to Koenisburg dumplings, yet her filling of a previously negative space creates an unease in the rebuilt family unit, particularly as she teeters around a romantic flirtation with Max. Max is a mechanic who works on cars, a leading provocation toward the manner in which Jakob died. Still, the strange prophetic attraction that occured for Laura with Betty transfers over to Max, creating a new, different but equally unresolved tension.

Miroirs No. 3 suggests sedate but persistent mysteries throughout, even though the family secrets are eminently guessable, and bring us around full circle to the question of Laura’s mental state prior to the accident. The ripples on the water at the film’s beginning become a visual simile to a billowing curtain in Laura’s apartment, so when we return there for the film’s abrupt, lingering final shot, there’s a sense that nothing has been resolved for Petzold’s mercurial protagonist. Prior to this, and in a weirdly stalkerish development, Betty and family muse over Laura’s mental state without her knowing, trying to discern meaning from the smallest of expressions, the minutiae of body language and appearance. It’s a guessing game we are left playing, also.

Betty has a curious picture framed in her kitchen; a motorway interchange, all loops and knots. Miroirs No. 3 feels like such an interchange, creating circles in the mind. A playlist at the family garage pipes out Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons’ “…The Night”. To paraphrase the lyrics of this peppy ’70s earworm, Petzold’s light touches always keep you dreaming.

One might argue that the touches are too light this time around. Miroirs No. 3 risks feeling ever-so small, ever-so slight, with its limited characters and setting, unhurried pace and almost diffident approach to resolution. There is a degree of closure. The intriguing episode detailed acts as a catalyst for change, for moving on. But Petzold keeps satisfaction to a minimum, in the process retaining the amorphous sense of mystery that buzzes around this picturesque postcard like the sound of the bees that zoom in and out of the canny sound design. Like the garden path we never get to follow, Miroirs No. 3 feels as though it makes promises it doesn’t keep. But that lack also gives it a strange, understated power that doesn’t vanish easily.