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I can’t think of another filmmaker as adapt as Petzold at capturing the loneliness of a character in a few shots, regardless of whether they are by themselves or in a crowd of people. At the beginning of Miroirs No. 3, Paula Beer’s Laura is in a car with her boyfriend and two others, and clearly wants to be anywhere else, like she has been disconnected from these others and cannot find her way back in. When they arrive at their destination, she asks to be taken home, and her boyfriend reluctantly and almost furiously drives her to the train station so she can make her own way back. He almost hits a woman painting a fence, like a premonition of what is to come, because later he catastrophically crashes the car off-screen, as we follow that woman – Betty, played by Barbara Auer (returned after a long absence since Die innere Sicherheit) – discovering his lifeless body, head crushed on a rock, and Laura’s, thrown from the car in the accident, unconscious but alive.
Petzold says he likes capturing characters in transitory moments in their life, when everything changes, when they step from one life into another one, and this is a dramatic break right at the beginning of the film. Instead of sending this stranger off to the hospital to recover, Betty takes her in and begins nursing her back to health before she even knows her name. When Laura awakes in someone else’s bedroom the next morning, there are two thermoses, one containing coffee, the other tea, on her bedside. There are clothes laid out and two choices of shoe – all these options making clear that Betty does not yet know her, but is being as accommodating as she can.
Remember how in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (arguably depending on your own interpretation of it, but this is mine), Naomi Watts’ Betty took in a stranger after a car accident, a woman suffering from amnesia (played by Laura Harring, who assumes the name of Rita after seeing it on a film poster). The first part of Mulholland Drive is a love story that becomes twisted by the second part – where it becomes clear that “Betty” has created a dream in which her cruel lover is transformed into someone gentle and vulnerable through the deus ex machina of the tabula rasa that the amnesia provides, for a period of time before the dream collapses. This imagined version of “Rita”, who falls in love with her and stays with her, is shaped into exactly what she needs, someone she can help and support. In Petzold’s interviews about this film, he says that his Laura was named after a different film, but I like the idea that some films live inside of you in a way that references to it would just naturally and accidentally emerge, unconscious tributes, little echoes that reverberate through a work.
As Laura recovers and assumes this different, new life, with no apparent desire to return to her old one (in fact, not really talking about it much either, like it has become distant – in short, there is no amnesia required here because Laura is willingly taking on the role that is offered to her), Betty fills it with a kind of beauty of mundane everyday life: shared meals, stories (as if reading a story to a child, she recounts the tale of Tom Sawyer painting a fence, as a kind of preparation or context for them painting Betty’s), gardening. In spite of how new their relationship is, they feel intimate and lived in, like they are perfectly matched, and it is only a fair bit in that Betty mentions her “two men” coming over for a meal that breaks the spell: Betty has seemed so self-contained in her solitude that Laura seems deeply surprised that there are other, so far unseen people in her life, much less a husband and a son. There is almost something thriller-like in Petzold’s introduction of these characters – a clear sense of conflict, of past drama, talk of Betty stopping to take some medication, a sense of dread, as they enter the house and find an extra place setting at the table while Laura is off-screen, cooking, like they have encountered this scene before but it has had a different meaning than it does now, when someone actually enters the room to occupy the space at the table. What has happened here, that the son and the husband no longer live in this house and are so cautious to return to it and be around their wife and mother? Maybe the moment to wonder whose bed Laura is sleeping in and whose clothes she is wearing should have happened earlier, but it becomes such a clear question here, in how the two very silent and guarded men (played by Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs) react to her presence.
Maybe the solution to the missing space in the middle of the family is obvious earlier than Max’ (the son) revelation to Laura, in horror, that both of her parents have begun to act as if she is his sister who died by suicide, but it shocks Laura out of what is surely part performance, part something that she deeply needed for her own healing, and she leaves, unable to maintain it and maybe sad and furious to be robbed of it, to have to return to her other life.
Something about this reminded me of Petzold’s Gespenster from twenty years ago, another film that captures the loneliness of its central character perfectly. Here, a mother is searching for her daughter who was kidnapped as a baby, approaching people who are of the right age with only a computer-generated guess at what her child would look like now to go by, desperate to find what she has lost, unable to move on from this incomprehensible trauma, and this need collides with Nina’s (Julia Hummer) deep desire for human connection with someone who will, for a change, stay.
I think these echoes of other works make Miroirs No. 3 even more compelling – it’s maybe my favourite of his films since Yella, which is also a ghost story of sorts – and there is so much more here that adds texture and beauty – like his ability to capture something as simple as welding a bike back together or the hints at whatever mysterious business is actually happening at the car garage, where luxury vehicles are being repaired and then exclusively paid for in cash. We don’t have to know everything, but it creates a whole world of possible stories to fall into.
2025, directed by Christian Petzold, starring Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs, Philip Froissant, Victoire Laly.
