In its brief American run so far, Phoenix has earned comparisons to Hitchcock and gained near-universal acclaim for its final scene. Between that and the film's plot - which follows a Holocaust survivor who, after recovering from facial reconstruction surgery that leaves her not quite recognizable, sets out to find the husband who might or might not have betrayed her - you might expect Phoenix to be a tense, unnerving psychological thriller, one that builds to an iconic confrontation. What you get, though, is very different - and that's not entirely a bad thing. Phoenix works better as a character/psychological study than it does as a literal story; indeed, those who dislike the film seem to largely be hung up on some of the difficulties of the story, which never really bothered me. The reason? Phoenix works masterfully as a study of this character, a woman desperate to rebuild her life and set the past behind her, only to find that there's little way to ignore what happened. That theme - a desire to ignore the past - fits neatly into the world of Phoenix, whose 1945 Berlin setting finds a whole population ready to ignore what's happened and revise the past, only to have it constantly return when they can least handle it. As for those Hitchcock comparisons, they make sense when you realize how much of Vertigo there is in this film, as women are forced to re-enact roles of lost lovers and reshape themselves for the desire of men around them. Phoenix is a quiet, haunting film, one that earns a lot of tension from its premise but uses it to explore the psychology of denial and loss beautifully. And while the final scene isn't the blowup I kind of expected, it's no less effective for what it is, which is a beautiful cap to the film that nicely draws everything together without so much as a word. My first reaction to Phoenix was a little bit of disappointment that it wasn't going to be the suspenseful thriller that I expected; as it played, though, I was entranced by what it was - something far richer and more complex, a study of love, loss, guilt, and historical shame that plays as both metaphor and painful love story. It's a gripping, beautiful piece of filmmaking, and if the final scene is more low-key than you might expect after all the praise, it's no less perfect for all of that.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
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