Phoenix (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]

Director Petzold creates the setting for a series of poignant post-war hardships of ex-lounge singer Nelly ( Nina Hoss) in a tale based on Hubert Monteihet's "Return from the Ashes." If you are a Petzold fan, you won't want to miss this compelling film.

I found the film to be thoroughly enjoyable. It is not as dark as the plot description and advertisement may imply. The star character, Nelly Lenz, is only facially disfigured at the beginning of the movie. Her face is swathed in bandages as a result of being shot in the face at Auschwitz and left for dead. After plastic surgery, the viewer initially sees the surgical scars. Eventually, the scars heal and she is a very attractive and elegant woman.I won’t recite the entire main plot or multiple sub-plots and stories. It is partly a story of revealed betrayal as the Jewish “Nelly” discovers that her husband “Johnny” secretly divorced her and then disclosed her hiding place to the Gestapo. A minor part of the story includes how the occupying Americans controlled post-war Berlin. The cafe “Phoenix” serves American soldiers and Germans; it is how the movie gets its name.I think that a secondary story is how perverse murderous discrimination ruined an elegant young woman.

I recommend this film to anyone who recognizes that special cinematic experience that sets apart the experience of seeing an upper echelon film. The story may take a couple viewings in order to absorb its nuances in the first 15-20 minutes or so, but your first-time viewing will be memorable, and you'll want to watch again (and again) to re-experience the emotional ride throughout and, especially, its awesome, powerful ending.

Reviews seem to over examine this movie, sometimes it's best to not closely scrutinize, but rather to let it flow over you and take it all in. This is a great movie, if you don't overanalyze it. Plausible, sorrowful and triumphant all at the same time. Kudos!

Honestly it was slow and boring I feel asleep. I will give it away

Even though I initially found the concept of Phoenix somewhat implausible (who wouldn't recognize their own wife?), I was more than willing to suspend my disbelief and to go along with the ride. And the longer I watched the movie, the less skeptical I became and the more engrossed I was with the overarching themes of identity and perception. Who am I? is the question at the center of this film and the director and actors address it in such a brilliant, emotional way. Beautiful, sad, and darkly romantic, Phoenix forces its audience to examine their own identity and how it is shaped by the perception of others. Definitely not for the Adam Sandler crowd, this film requires an emotional and intellectual commitment, but the payoff is well worth the investment.

The delivery was good. However beware this dvd comes from the U.K.and cannot be played on dvd players in the U.S. without special equipment or pressing some buttons on you dvd player. There is nothing on the description advising this. The seller wants me to pay all shipping charges if I return this item. I do want to return it, but feel I shouldn't have to pay any shipping as I was not given this information before I purchased the dvd. Shame on them !

Phoenix, like "East/West," is another Movie to Hate Your Husband By. And it presents a new story for the post-Holocaust/Post-WWII genre. One I hadn't thought of. And Phoenix does it pretty well.In Phoenix, a young Jewish woman returns from the camps. Of her entire wealthy family, only she survived the holocaust. But she's facially disfigured and has leg injuries. Reconstructive surgery is successful, but she doesn't quite look like her old self. And she's going to walk differently until she recovers from her leg wounds too.In the meantime, her German husband survived the war but assumes she didn't. But he wants her inheritance from her dead, wealthy family. So the husband goes looking for a young woman who looks similar to his wife. So she can impersonate his assumed dead wife. If this impostor woman is good enough, the husband and this impostor woman can trick the courts into giving them his assumed dead wife's inheritance.The problem for the husband is that his young Jewish wife did survive the war, and she's back in Berlin looking for him. They find each other, and due to the wife's reconstructive surgery, the husband doesn't recognize her. But in his view, she looks close enough like his assumedly dead wife to pull off the inheritance scam. So he recruits her into the scam. Takes her in, trains her to become his assumedly dead wife, gives her his assumedly dead wife's clothing, and takes her to places they used to go so she can talk about them like his assumedly dead wife could.And the young Jewish wife decides to play along with it. To not tell her husband that she's in fact his wife. She agrees to literally impersonate herself! Why? Because the young Jewish wife needs to find out if it was her own husband who actually betrayed her to the Nazis and got her sent off to Hell. She's hearing he did but doesn't want to believe it.She finds out the answer- and finds out one more fact that will foil her husband's slimy, despicable plot. But how long can she keep acting like she's not really herself? Will her husband realize it's really her? Should she accept her friend's offer to move to Palestine, to the future Israel, and start a new, safe life, and put her husband and her inheritance all behind her? Or should she keep being a part of her husband's scam to steal her inheritance?I've never seen a post-Holocaust/post-WWII movie with this storyline before, and it's done well. The acting is very good, the scenes of destroyed, post-war Berlin and the people who inhabit it are very authentic, and the storyline is easy to follow. My only complaints are that the storyline drags on longer than it needs to - this could have been a shorter movie - and that the slimy husband should have figured out earlier that his impostor recruit is in fact his wife. Couldn't he have recognized her voice? What about her eyes? But this dolt doesn't realize who she is until the very end.Oh, and Phoenix is one of those movies that suddenly end - that suddenly the credits start rolling - instead of finishing the story. So Phoenix could have been a shorter movie with a better ending.That aside, Phoenix is a good movie. Definitely worth a watch. Another "Movie to Hate Your Husband By."

Phoenix se ha convertido en mi película favorita de la trilogía "Love in Times of Oppressive Systems", dirigida por Christian Petzold. Me dio gusto adquirir esta edición, ya que es evidente la calidad que Criterion le aporta a sus productos. En particular, considero un acierto el rediseño de la portada.Es un DVD región 1 que cuenta con subtítulos en inglés, además de varias características especiales y un folleto con un ensayo acerca de la obra.

Ce film révèle parfaitement le côté sombre, obscure et sournois des hommes avec une vérité aussi brutale que choquante avec une intrigue ourdit pendant les années de la seconde guerre mondiale où une jeune et jolie femme juive, ancienne chanteuse connue, dans les années 1930, dans les cabarets de Londres, Berlin et de Paris, miraculeusement rescapée des camps de la mort, revoit son mari, persuadée de sa mort, qui entend profiter de l'absurde ressemblance avec son épouse pour manigancer, avec perfidie, des retrouvailles heureuses de telle sorte à obtenir un non moins conséquent héritage qu'elle possède depuis l'extermination de toute sa famille. Les images des villes détruites, les jeux éloquents des acteurs, les habits de l'époque concourt un magnifique film d'autant que la fin, avec la voix sublime et étincelante de l'héroïne, offre une morale très juste et pleine d'espoir selon laquelle même après des épreuves aussi terribles que les humiliations, les brimades, les injures, les discrédits, la déchéance morale, la pauvreté ou la honte, la beauté et les dons naturels que détient toute personne peut renaître brillamment tel un phoenix qui renaît de ses cendres

El llamado nuevo cine alemán sorprende tanto por los temas tratados, como en Phoenix, tanto por el guión , la actuación y la excelsa dirección.

Very good film, Nina Hoss is a great actress. Too bad there was no English translation instead of subtitles.

Phoenix is a powerful film which makes all of its points, some of which are quite painful, in the most understated way possible. The homage to Alfred Hitchcock is simple and free of irony or self-reference. The plot has been discussed in numerous reviews so I will not review it here. Suffice it to say that Nina Hoss is totally convincing as Nelly, a survivor of Auschwitz. The film begins shortly after the Allied victory, in a Europe which is filled with people on the move. Displaced persons, concentration camp survivors, and Nazis fleeing Germany are on the roads and military checkpoints can hardly tell one group from another. We first meet Nelly at one such checkpoint as she is being transported to a hospital where she will receive plastic surgery to her disfiguring facial wounds. Everyone at the checkpoint is weary, suspicious and frightened. A soldier orders Nelly to remove the bandage from her ravaged face, and then, embarrassed and somewhat sheepish, lets her pass. No scenes of battle, no desperate gunfights, no tank warfare. Just weariness, and this tells the story of what came before better than any cinematic visual flashbacks ever could.At the start of the film Nelly is deeply scarred both physically and emotionally, and we learn that she sustained herself through the unimaginable humiliation and suffering of the camps by remembering a past that never was, and dreaming of a future that never could be. The horrors of that life are made real to us, not by brutal dramatization, but by almost gentle understatement. Just as Primo Levi's soft, introspective prose proved more powerful in condemning Nazi inhumanity than the most graphic journalism, director Christian Petzold's intensely personal film leaves the viewer deeply moved. By limiting his study to a few individuals affected irreversibly by their war-related experiences he tells us more about the Holocaust than I ever thought possible.