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Christian Petzold’s “Miroirs No. 3,” which has its world premiere on Saturday in Directors’ Fortnight, is set in present-day Germany but it evokes a gothic fairytale, albeit set in a landscape reminiscent of the American Mid-West.
At the start of the film, Laura, played by Paula Beer, is experiencing an undefined mental crisis but reluctantly agrees to go on a car journey with her boyfriend. After a mysterious accident, in which the boyfriend is killed, Laura is taken under the wing of a kind woman, Betty, played by Barbara Auer, who lives near the crash site.
The film unfolds like a fairytale, similar to the stories of Brothers Grimm, Petzold tells Variety. Betty is portrayed as a witch-like character, like the old woman in “Hansel and Gretel.” She lives on her own on the edge of town, where she gathers medicinal plants from the garden, and is viewed with suspicion by the villagers. Before the car crash, Laura sees Betty standing at the front of her house and the accident seems to be triggered by her appearance as if it were the result of a spell or a curse.
We soon learn that Betty is also troubled and lonely. She is separated from her husband, Richard (played by Matthias Brandt), and their adult son, Max (played by Enno Trebs), and a dark secret is hinted at.
The crash is like a rebirth, Petzold says, and Betty acts like a mother to Laura, reading her a story by Mark Twain, feeding her and tending to her wounds. Soon Laura is making her first steps into the world – she rides a bike, and dances joyfully to music with Max.
One strand running through the film is that of reconstruction and repair, Petzold says. Betty and Laura paint the picket fence, Max repairs the dish washer and Laura’s bicycle, and so on. Meanwhile the lives of the protagonist are undergoing a similar process of mending. Their repair comes out of a feeling of solidarity that slowly builds between them, which is encapsulated in a scene where Laura cooks a meal for them and, for the first time in years, they sit and eat as a family.
Petzold says the inspiration for the film came from a line in a letter written by poet and playwright Heinrich von Kleist in 1800. This came to mind when he was making his last film, “Afire,” which also starred Beer, Trebs and Brandt. When Kleist passed through a city gate in Würzburg, he said: “Why, I wondered, doesn’t the arch collapse, since it has no support? It stands, I answered, because all the stones are about to collapse at once.”
Petzold told the actors on “Afire”: “Ok, the next movie is about a group of people who are all falling down, and because all of them are falling down, they are building a room, and this room is our film. This was the idea. It was born there.” Out of the mutual support these damaged characters offer each other, they can recover from their past traumas and move on with their lives.
But while the story has a Germanic fairytale-type quality, the landscape in which it takes place and the look of Betty’s house evoke the American Mid-West in the 1950s and 60s. Around the house is a veranda, suggesting that the occupant is looking out at the world expectantly, Petzold says, and around the house is a white picket fence, reminiscent of the house at the start of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet.” The car the boyfriend drives is an American-style convertible, and Richard drives a pick-up truck, and the music Laura and Max dance to is also suitably American retro – “The Night” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.
English (US) ·