German director Christian Petzold, the Chabrol of modern European cinema, delivers an elegant and disquieting psychological mystery of the sort that doesn\u2019t interest today\u2019s British film-makers, though this one appears to have more than a taste of PD James or Ruth Rendell. There\u2019s also a hint of Joseph Losey\u2019s Accident. It is about family dysfunction and grief and unnervingly lays out the aftermath of a sudden violent trauma. The faint suggestion that the film itself has gone into a kind of shock could have layered the proceedings with something infinitesimally dreamlike and unreal, an atmosphere often to be found in Petzold\u2019s films. What makes this film interesting is that it isn\u2019t heading for a macabre twist or chilling denouement but something positive and even redemptive.<\/p>\n
Petzold\u2019s longtime female lead Paula Beer plays Laura, a brilliant pianist studying music in Berlin, clearly in a fragile and depressed state. We are ultimately to see her on stage performing the third movement of Maurice Ravel\u2019s Miroirs, the dreamily rippling A Boat on the Ocean, which gives the film its title. Paula is stuck in an unhappy relationship with boorish would-be music mogul Jakob (Philip Froissant), who one tense afternoon loses control of his open-topped sports car in the Brandenburg countryside. The results are catastrophic for Jakob, but Laura, thrown clear from the passenger seat, miraculously survives with hardly more than a scratch.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
That isn\u2019t all. Just before the crash, Laura had briefly locked eyes with a hypnotically intense woman standing by the roadside as their car zoomed by, staring, perhaps even grieving, as if she has predicted or maybe willed the imminent disaster. This is Betty, played by Barbara Auer (an intense presence also in Petzold\u2019s earlier movie Transit<\/a>). Betty offers to let the badly shaken Laura stay with her; they appear to set up home in Betty\u2019s pleasant but run-down house, oddly without Laura being bothered by the authorities needing her to testify in any inquest. Betty lives alone but seems to have clothes in Laura\u2019s size \u2013 a young person\u2019s jeans and T-shirts \u2013 and encourages Laura to play the piano that she owns but doesn\u2019t play herself.<\/p>\n Betty appears to be semi-estranged from her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and grownup son Max (Enno Trebs), who run a dodgy car-repair workshop and don\u2019t play the piano either. And in the film\u2019s one moment of out-and-out unsubtlety, Betty even accidentally calls her new guest \u201cYelena\u201d before correcting that to \u201cLaura\u201d.<\/p>\n Can\u2019t Laura see what\u2019s going on? Petzold repeatedly shows us moments in which Betty, Richard and Max try to conceal things from her, or whisper little secrets, but Laura always catches them out. Could it be that she knows what is happening and is silently complicit? Betty may be an emotionally damaged emotional parasite or predator, but so might Laura. It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.<\/p>\n Miroirs No 3 is in UK cinemas from 17 April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"German director Christian Petzold, the Chabrol of modern European cinema, delivers an elegant and disquieting psychological mystery of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":533851,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-533850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/533851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}