The main female characters in Christian Petzold’s films are kindred spirits – sisters in subversiveness. Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on six movies together, from the made-for-TV thriller Something to Remind Me (2001) to Phoenix (2014), the harrowing story of an Auschwitz survivor.
Both those films drew on Alfred Hitchock's Vertigo (1958). So does his new one, Miroirs No. 3, in which a troubled Berlin piano student walks out of her unhappy ordinary life into a kind of fairy tale. Played by Paula Beer – previously Petzold's muse in Transit (2018), Undine (2020), and Afire (2023) – Laura finds refuge in a small house in the East German countryside following a car accident. It's owned by the middle-aged Betty (Barbara Auer, another of Petzold's favourite actors), who tries to mould Laura into someone else, as Vertigo's Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) does Judy Barton (Kim Novak).
Because of what Laura and Betty recognize in each other they are able to resolve the traumas that have individually entrapped them. In his psycholgical mysteries, Petzold loves playing with the idea of how people leave the past behind to build something new, whether it's advisable or not. In this respect, the news that Beer and Hoss will both star in his next film is tantalizing.
PAMELA JAHN: In Miroirs No. 3, Laura steps out of her life and settles in another. What fascinated you about this idea?
CHRISTIAN PETZOLD: I once read that after the tsunami in Thailand, where so many people went missing, some of them seized the opportunity to let go of their previous identities, and I wondered why. At the same time, it is also a very old cinematic theme. In fact, cinema in itself is, of course, a form of escapism: We enter a dark room, still feeling our body, but as soon as the film starts, our minds and souls delve deep into the realm of the imaginary, and at least for that short amount of time, we no longer feel the burden of our everyday life.
Laura's decision has certain consequences...
The problem is that when someone desires to step out of their identity the result is that they simply reproduce it. A classic example is that all the men who go out to buy cigarettes and never return to their families will be found three years later living with a new wife and two children in a different suburb.
Does cinema ever enable you to escape from yourself?
I wouldn’t put it quite like that. I see cinema more as an opportunity to be confronted with "the other". The camera lens has opened up a different world to us. [Jean-Luc] Godard would say it's a world of desire. Le Mépris [Contempt, 1963] is set in this kind of alternative universe. For example, why do we love crime thrillers so much? A lot of it has to do with the fact that detectives get access to the homes and lives of people we don't normally get to see.
Laura fills a void in Betty’s life, and vice versa – much of what happened before these two women meet remains unsaid. How much detail do you fill in for yourself when writing a screenplay?
I always have the full backstories of my characters in my head, and my cast knows that. Consequently, the actors often like me to tell the characters' biographies to them. In that case, I bring up Alice in Wonderland, because no one can tell me where Alice comes from, what her parents are called, or what her bedroom looks like. And why? Because it is only in that moment when Alice jumps down the rabbit hole that she experiences a story and her biography. Through her behaviour, her curiosity, her intelligence, she becomes a character. And cinema is always a place where we see something becoming – not something that is.
On the other hand, one could argue that in Miroirs No. 3 you deprive Laura of her biography.
In that respect, the first three shots in the film are crucial: a young woman on a bridge looking into the water, the same young woman standing by the water who throws away or drops her bag, why we don't know. And then the ferryman of death [a paddleboarder inspired by the figure of Charon in Arnold Böcklin's painting Isle of the Dead] passes by. Subsequently, she is confronted with the reality of her everyday life as soon as she enters her apartment because of her boyfriend, who is waiting for her. But she is no longer part of any of this. She's already starting to slip away from that world.
There's always something mysterious or unknowable about the women Paula Beer plays in your films
What I found intriguing about Paula's character Marie in Transit is that she's a woman who is described in letters before we meet her in the film; she essentially appears only in our imagination, and then she takes on a life of her own. Perhaps that is what interests me most – when the female characters, who are essentially male fantasies, rebel against what is imposed upon them. It’s a similar set up in Afire. There, too, the writer has a certain image of the young woman, who sells ice-cream at the beach and has loud sex at night. But then he learns that she's writing her doctoral thesis on Heinrich von Kleist, and the whole construct in his mind collapses. Perhaps Paula is exactly the right person for this, because she herself is a bit like that. She's elusive and impossible to pin down.
You once described your characters as "shipwrecked". What exactly do you mean by that?
Yes, that’s right. Heiner Müller, the renowned East German playwright, poet, and theatre director, once said that the idea of communism had suffered shipwreck. I found that image or metaphor very fitting. In cinema, we very often see at the beginning that people are thrown off course by different circumstances – an accident, a traumatic experience, an illness. Observing these people as they try to build a new life for themselves out of these fragments is perhaps the most human, the most touching thing a director can portray in a film.
To stick with Heiner Müller: has our democracy also suffered shipwreck?
Yes, and it was never a large ship with the sturdiness of a tanker. The painful truth is that the best and most beautiful things are always fragile, but we only seem to realise this when it's much too late.
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