Mirrors No.3

Bluesky

Christian Petzold’s miraculously soothing Miroirs No. 3 (Mirrors No. 3 - a highlight of the 63rd New York Film Festival) feels opulent in its caring and contains exactly the right amount of disquiet to keep the suspense of what it is we are actually watching. Starring his frequent collaborator Paula Beer (Transit, Undine, Afire), opposite an equally excellent Barbara Auer, this ever so charmingly otherworldly tale takes us into a realm that can best be described as in-between.

It begins on an urban bridge. A woman, whom we will later get to know as Laura (Beer), stares down at the water. Her pale blue sweater (costume design by Petzold regular Katharina Ost) looks torn and frayed at the edges, so that it takes a second glance to realize that the garment is made of precious yarns. The deconstructed duck in the front hints at a style choice and not a sign of wear but we cannot be certain. Beer’s expression, equally illegible, only hints that we are watching someone on the brink.

A man in a black wetsuit paddles by, standing in his canoe. He could equally be a sporty Berliner or Charon and brings to mind how, as in Petzold’s Undine, the worlds of lore flow so effortlessly into the everyday. The film’s title refers to the third movement of Maurice Ravel’s suite, Une Barque Sur l'Océan,” and the curtains in Laura’s apartment that twice prominently fill the screen, have a big blue border at the bottom, as if half under water.

A weekend trip is planned and she finds herself in a red cabriolet with her boyfriend Jakob (Philip Froissant) and a couple whom he is eager to impress in a work related matter. While driving on country roads, they listen to Mathilde Santing’s version of You Go To My Head, as haunting and many-splendored a choice as Kurt Weill’s Speak Low was for Petzold’s Phoenix. Music is piano student Laura’s realm. But she is elsewhere now and as they pass by a lovely house at the side of a road, she exchanges a foreboding glance with the woman (the second person in the film dressed in head-to-toe black) who is painting her fence.

Spoken about in the third person as if she weren’t even there, Laura, who doesn’t feel well, wants to return to the city. Instead, after a horrible accident, she lands up in the house with the woman (Auer) who was freshening up her fence, who introduces herself as Betty. Welcoming and mysterious at once, the two women get to know each other the way it happens in fairy tales. You move right in. The stranger’s house had been waiting for you all along. Reminiscent of shaking the featherbed for Mother Holle or oiling Baba Yaga’s gate, Laura helps out her host by painting the fence, tending to the herb garden, and cooking Königsberger Klopse (a traditional meatball dish with lemon and capers) for “her men,” who are not seven little miners, but Betty’s husband, Richard, and son, Max ((Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs, both returning from Petzold’s previous film, Afire), who seem to reside not far off in the forest where their car repair workshop is located.

Laura is well taken care of, with coffee and tea and a plate of apples waiting for her next to the freshly made bed she slept the night in. Clothes are left out for her to wear, jeans that fit and a selection of reddish-pink tops. As is true of many a tale, not all motivations are on the table right away, and finding rescue and respite with strangers can only last a mere while. Far from the ominous obvious lurkings in many horror movies, the inquietude is much more subtle and of a different realm altogether.

Mirroring, replacement, wish-fulfillment, doublings and ancient longing - Petzold unearths the wondrous in the mundane. Paula Beer once again transports precarious food on a bike (this time not goulash as in Afire, but plum cake and cream) and the situational humor mingles with the horror - the wonder, the threat that is always just around the corner for all of us.

“Are you criminals?” Laura asks Max, as though she were in a Brecht play, and the lyrics “Beware of his promise” from the song The Night by Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons ring out from his workshop. In Petzold’s world an exploding dishwasher and the haunted cinema quality the name Laura carries with it (since Otto Preminger’s noir) do not contradict each other.

More than in his previous films, Petzold here offers us a homecoming to a place we never knew and maybe always knew. A peace in knowing you are allowed to be taken care of or, the other trajectory, allowed to take care of someone. It is the gentleness of fairy tales and its deep connection to our longings in times of crisis that is offered with Miroirs No. 3. An utterly extraordinary gift indeed.

Source