Miroirs No 3 Review – An Unnerving Mystery of Grief and Family Dysfunction by Christian Petzold | film

gGerman director Christian Petzold, the Chabrol of modern European cinema, presents an elegant and unsettling psychological mystery of a kind that hardly interests British filmmakers today, although this film seems to have more than just the taste of directors James or Ruth Rendell. There is also a hint of Joseph Losey’s accident. It is about family dysfunction and grief and disturbingly outlines the effects of sudden violent trauma. The faint suggestion that the film itself has undergone some kind of trauma could have given the events something dream-like and unreal, an atmosphere that can often be found in Petzold’s films. What makes this film interesting is that it doesn’t move towards a shocking twist or a horrific conclusion, but rather towards something positive and even redemptive.

Paula Beer, Petzold’s longtime heroine, plays Laura, a brilliant pianist studying music in Berlin, clearly in a fragile and depressed state. We’ll eventually see her on stage performing the third movement from Maurice Ravel’s “Mirrors,” the dreamy, undulating “Boat on the Ocean,” which gives the film its title. Paula is trapped in an unhappy relationship with the gruff music mogul Jacob (Philippe Froissant), who loses control of his open-top sports car in the Brandenburg countryside one tense day. The results were disastrous for Jacob, but Laura, who was thrown from the passenger seat, narrowly escaped without suffering more than a scratch.

That’s not all. Just before the accident, Laura looked briefly at a deeply hypnotized woman standing on the side of the road as their car approached, staring, perhaps even saddened, as if she had predicted or perhaps wanted the impending disaster. This is Betty, played by Barbara Auer (who was also a strong presence in Petzold’s previous film, Transit). Betty offers to let a severely shaken Laura stay with her; They seem to have set up home in Betty’s nice but dilapidated house, and Laura is strangely unbothered by the authorities who need her to testify in any investigation. Betty lives alone but seems to have clothes in Laura’s size—jeans and T-shirts for teens—and encourages Laura to play the piano, which she has but does not play herself.

Betty seems almost estranged from her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and adult son Max (Eno Trips), who run a dodgy car repair shop and don’t play the piano either. In one particularly ambiguous moment in the film, Betty mistakenly calls her new guest “Jelena” before correcting it to “Laura.”

Can’t Laura see what’s happening? Petzold repeatedly shows us moments when Betty, Richard and Max try to hide things from her, or whisper little secrets, but Laura always finds out. Is it possible that she knows what’s going on and is silently complicit? Betty might be an emotionally damaged parasite or predator, but so could Laura. It is a highly enjoyable and elegantly inventive study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in his nest.