Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

Minor Variations:
An Interview with Christian Petzold
by Sam Bodrojan

Miroirs No. 3 is a softer film than Christian Petzold has ever made. The German director’s latest foregoes the outward audaciousness of such works as Phoenix and Transit. Its slipperiness comes not from the unknown but from the unacknowledged.

The film follows Laura (Paula Beer), a collegiate musician whose boyfriend crashes their car in the German countryside, killing him and leaving her shaken and alone. Betty, a woman who lives down the road from the accident, invites Laura to stay with her. The two fall into a fast domestic intimacy, though Betty’s husband (Matthias Brandt) and son (Enno Trebs), local car mechanics, meet Laura with more trepidation. Miroirs No. 3 is a film about mourning and futile attempts to conjure an unreachable past. Petzold, famous for obfuscating his characters’ desires and histories, allows these people to be seen for who they are from the second they appear onscreen.

The result is deceptively haunting. The audience may spend the film convinced that there will be some unexpected reveal to reframe the preceding events. No such relief comes. Instead, we are made to sit in a spiritual stillness. The present is an unavoidable and terrifying thing in Miroirs No. 3, but it is restorative, too. The cumulative effect of such an ostensibly small film is overwhelming; even weeks later, memories of its images still greet me when I awake each morning.

I sat down with Petzold last month during the Toronto International Film Festival. We spoke in a sparse hotel room. The walls were beige and there was a skylight, though I could not see a window nor could I imagine how a room in the middle of a massive hotel must be shaped to allow for such a feature. The man is kind and unpretentious and attentive. He is funny, too; he claimed he could not speak English well because he had earlier forgotten the word for “anklet.” Nevertheless, he spoke with clarity and wit about the movie, his practice, and the political realities facing Germany.

Reverse Shot: Your work often hinges on moments of surprise, but what I found most surprising and refreshing about this film is the real lack of revelation. There is the assumption, implicitly, that we understand what has happened, at least enough. How do you feel revelation has factored into your work, and does it feel different in Miroirs?

Christian Petzold: Previously, I have made these films about the past; Barbara and Phoenix and Transit are period pieces. In the last two or three years, I’ve had the feeling that the people who live around me in Germany don't believe in the future. They’ve started to build up caves for themselves, where they want to survive. This feeling, that one’s story is a story of survival, is new for me. Once, when I was at the Venice Film Festival, Claude Chabrol had an interview like we have now, and I was sitting there five meters away. They asked him, “Why are you always shooting with women as main characters?” And he said, “Men are living, women are surviving, and cinema is about surviving.” This is a good answer. We have to make movies about surviving and repairing. It's not a world where young people can just get into a car and drive the road. This future, they don't have that anymore. We have to think about what happened, how we can repair souls, minds, and societies. I wanted to show a group in one house, with one car, with one fence, with one kitchen, and how they try to survive, and how they try to repair the things which are broken. So this was the idea. This was the political situation for me.

RS: You apply the same approach that you once applied to climate catastrophe or mermaids to blue collar workers. What compelled you to show them in this almost fable-like quality? What do you think compels you to approach this aesthetic at this time, especially given encroaching fascism within the country?

CP: You know, in Miroirs, there is a song by Frankie Valli, “The Night.” And the last scene of the movie is like the scene from The Deer Hunter by Michael Cimino. The song in that movie is also a Frankie Valli song. In the ’70s, the American cinema, the cinema after Vietnam, is the cinema of a totally broken country. They are not the “good ones” anymore. The steel mill workers of Pennsylvania were sent to Vietnam because the country didn't need them anymore. The workers were not needed. Therefore they could go to Vietnam and get killed. Nowadays Trump is in Pennsylvania saying, “I want to revitalize the mills, the coal.” The workers are alone in this world. They can go to war, or they can elect Trump. In both situations they will die. This was my thinking. The fascism is coming because our world is completely complicated, and the fascists want to give very simple answers. And they are lying. And these broken people in the movie I made, they have found themselves, based on a lie.

RS: You have spoken before about your dissatisfaction with the original ending to your film. What initially drew you to that conclusion?

CP: I'd seen a movie by Claude Sautet [Cesar and Rosalie]. In this movie there are two men who have fallen in love with Romy Schneider and they’re fighting over her. So she vanishes, because she can't stand them anymore. Then a year later she comes back. She's standing at the fence of one of the guy’s houses, and she can see through the window that these guys are friends now, they don't need her anymore. And this was a fantastic final scene. So when I wrote the script [for Miroirs], I had a scene where the family is on the porch and they're eating eggs and drinking, like in the Cimino movie. And then they're shocked because she [Paula Beer] is standing at the fence. And then I had the sentence, “She opens the door of the fence and she enters the world of the family.” This was the last sentence. And I was so pathetic about it. I sent the script to all the actors. Paula came to me and said, “Are you really sure that this is the final ending?” Then in the editing suite, Bettina Bruder, the editor, said, “I don't like it so much.” I was totally depressed for two weeks. I stopped editing. Because they were right. You can't tell a story of a dead girl who is reborn, and in the end, she makes the same thing again. The first daughter died because the house of the family killed her. The second girl can't come back there. What kind of movie is this? Then we had the idea to go back to the first scene, when she's in her apartment with the curtain. And now, it's the same curtain. It's the same apartment. But something has deeply changed. It's her life now. She's independent. And the family is also independent, in a way.

We made the film in October, and I wanted to reshoot the ending in January. Paula gave me a call and said, “You can only shoot my face, because I’m eight months pregnant.” And the shot, because she's pregnant, she looks beautiful. Something is new in her face. So this was good luck.

RS: These actors have worked with you for years—not just Paula Beer but also Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs. What are the benefits of working with actors across multiple projects?

CP: I'm from Germany. We pretend to have film production, but we don't. We have television production, and some money for movies. Harun [Farocki] and I said to ourselves, “When we start to make movies, we have to have a group. We have to work outside of the capital.” When you're working in small independent groups, you have to be strong and find an ensemble. Barbara Auer has been in seven movies of mine, Paula Beer in four, Nina Hoss in six, Matthias Brandt in six. Some of my friends are painters, some of them are writers. They are working by themselves. But I love, in cinema, the collective work. You need a group of people to talk to, and you have to work with them for a long time. So I have this group. Sometimes I need refreshment, but I love them all. Absolutely.

RS: Many pivotal events, like the car accident or the dishwasher explosion result from malfunctioning machines. Was this a deliberate motif?

Petzold: You know, in American movies, there is the feeling that they don’t throw their garbage away. These things happen now in Germany too. Especially in the German Democratic Republic. The infrastructure doesn't work anymore. There's no bus coming. They have just one supermarket 25 miles away. So everybody has to have a big car. It's little bit like America there. And they're voting right-wing at the same moment.

There are cities there with American names: Philadelphia, New Boston. Because historically, it was Prussia. It was a military state. And the military state Prussia needed young men as soldiers. And their dreams were American dreams. They wanted to go to the USA for a new life. But they stayed in Germany. And so they called their villages Philadelphia. But nowadays, America is garbage. Philadelphia is garbage.

RS: That's where I'm from. And it's all deindustrialized. Everything is run down. It is the only place in the country where there are old buildings, which is nice. I don't know how much time you've spent in America, but there are no old buildings.

CP: I have a friend in California who rented a house. The owner showed him the bathroom and said, “Look, the toilet is from 1962!” Like it was from the 17th century. Capitalism is not interested in repairing things. They don't want to renovate a house. It's cheaper to bomb this house and build a new one. What happens to people when their environment doesn't tell a history?

RS: Where did you find the house where the film takes place?

CP: This house doesn't exist in this form. It's a ruin. Someone I know bought it. But I liked the atmosphere there. All these things, like the fence, the porch, didn’t exist. Later on, everybody from this village said it looked beautiful. But someone made a phone call, and the owner of the house had to take down everything we had built there. It’s horrible. They are jealous. There are so many people who don’t know what beauty is. They want to destroy it. It’s always the same.

RS: Of course there is a lot of music throughout Miroirs. But there was one Chopin piece that Paula Beer plays. I knew it because I learned it as a child. What drew you to these compositions?

CP: That particular piece is very popular, because when there's a young student, and their mother says, “Can you play piano for me?” You don't play avant-garde. You play something for a good mood. Here it's a little bit like this. In that scene, the piano is placed so that they don't see her face. And the notes on the piano are the notes of the dead daughter. So, for this moment, they start crying. Because for one moment of Chopin, their dead daughter is in the room. That's very beautiful.