Review by Michael O’Malley
To say that an artist has repeated themselves is often thrown out as a criticism, but one thing that can be nice about getting to know an artist’s body of work is the feeling of comfort as the rhythms and tropes of the artist become familiar. At least, that’s how I felt watching Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3. Whereas Petzold’s last couple films, Undine and Afire, respectively pushed toward more arcane and more satirical territories than his previous work, Miroirs No. 3 finds him settling back into thematic and narrative patterns that have spanned the German auteur’s filmography.
The plot is this: Laura (Paula Beer), a pianist studying music at a university in Berlin, is on her way to a weekend outing in the country with her boyfriend Jakob when she decides that she doesn’t actually want to go. In fact, she seems increasingly dissatisfied with her life in general: anxious about her studies and maybe even considering breaking off her relationship with Jakob, with whom things seem to have been tense recently. Before anything of the sort comes to a head, though, fate intervenes when on the drive back from the aborted outing, the couple get into a car wreck that kills Jakob. The paramedic suggests that Laura come with him to the hospital to be checked out for injuries, but, perhaps seeing a chance to delay a return to an already uneasy life that will now also be haunted by a deceased loved one, Laura makes a strange request: to recover by staying at the rustic cottage of the local woman (Barbara Auer) who first arrived at the scene of the accident. This woman’s name is Betty, an aging woman seemingly living by herself, and for reasons even more opaque than Laura’s, she agrees to host this perfect stranger.
The bulk of Miroirs No. 3 unfolds at Betty’s cottage as both Laura and we viewers learn more about Betty and her motivations for welcoming Laura so easily. Fairly early on, it becomes clear that Betty isn’t living entirely on her own; just a short bike ride away live her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and adult son Max (Enno Trebs), who run a garage that, among other things, turns off GPS tracking for cars (possibly an echo of the political anxieties of Petzold’s Transit, though just as likely a mere tool for philandering men). Both men seem somewhat estranged from Betty but not enough to avoid checking in on her. The family has apparently weathered tragedy in the not too distant past, a tragedy that seems to have at some point precipitated mental health instabilities in Betty.
A lot of this is familiar ground for Petzold. The use of doubles in the plot and characters remains a Petzold trope, and calling this one “Mirrors Number 3” (besides referencing the Maurice Ravel piano piece that Beer’s character plays) seems like it could be a sly acknowledgement of just how many of his films could justifiably have shared that title. Furthermore, the haunting of the present by past tragedy recalls Phoenix and Undine, and the echoing of plots from iconic classic Hollywood films is a well Petzold returns to again and again—Jerichow’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Transit’s Casablanca, Phoenix’s Vertigo, and now Miroirs’s Rebecca and, well, Vertigo again. Even the faces of the characters themselves should ring bells; most of the cast (including all of the central four performers) has played in multiple Petzold films in the past, and specifically Paula Beer has become something of a muse for Petzold since Transit.
And it’s nice! Petzold is good at what he does, and this film is no exception, even if perhaps a bit too much of it is banked on waiting on the other shoe to drop in a mystery that is ultimately not all that surprising, especially for anyone familiar with Vertigo and Rebecca. I get the impression that shocking revelations weren’t really the intent here, and the dark, twisty undercurrents of those Hitchcock precedents are ultimately something of a feint. Nor does the film seem particularly interested in the Bergman-esque psychological gauntlet initially teased by the isolated country setting haunted by death and family drama.
In fact, the most surprising thing about the movie is that it ends up being rather sweet. While the uneasy obsessions and ghostly premonitions of Miroirs’s cinematic influences aren’t entirely absent from the film, the shape the movie eventually takes is one of progress through those darknesses. The liminal arrangement between Laura and Betty ultimately fractures in the ways you might guess of a situation premised on being a proxy for deferred past traumas and present insecurities; yet despite that fracturing, the movie ends on a coda that seems to show the characters better off than when the movie began.
Arguably, there’s a certain ambiguity about how sincerely we’re supposed to take this: the fact that “better off” involves putting each character back in their socially designated “right place” (whether that be the reinstatement of a nuclear family unit or the return to a bourgeois stability) makes the ending remarkably pat in a way that raises questions of how much these characters are actually happier versus simply parroting the social scripts within the roles expected of them. But I’m actually inclined to take the ending at face value, not as a neutralization of the thornier premise but an affirmation of it. The ultimate structures that govern our lives may be beyond our control, but imagining radical reconfigurations of our lives is an important part of finding peace within those structures.
I can see others finding this to be an instance of an auteur’s work losing its teeth, but I dunno, even the world of austere European arthouse cinema deserves happiness every once in a while, right?