Genre-bender Mistaken Identity
Genre-bender François Ozon’s new film, The New Girlfriend, is another of the French provocateur’s playful studies of genre and gender. We find out what makes this mischievous filmmaker tick Interview: Jamie Dunn
“I
Mistaken Identity The collaboration between German director Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss, his go-to leading lady, has proved one of the most artistically fruitful in contemporary cinema. Petzold discusses their latest film, Phoenix Interview: Patrick Gamble
D
espite making his debut 15 years ago, with The State I Am In, and being widely considered the most talented director of post-1989 Germany, Christian Petzold remains relatively unknown outside his native country. But all that’s about to change with the release of his latest film, Phoenix, a Hitchcockian thriller set in post-war Berlin. Petzold’s characters often find themselves in situations in which they must conceal a secret; they’re usually alienated, alone and struggling to escape Germany. For Petzold, it’s his nation’s default mode. “We have no songs in Germany,” he tells us. “The Nazis ruined them all. The only songs we have are pop songs from the 60s, but all these songs are about leaving Germany and how we’re all lonely. I think this desire to go away is very deep within the German soul.” In Phoenix, Petzold’s frequent collaborator Nina Hoss plays Nelly, a disfigured concentration camp survivor who, after major facial reconstruction, returns to Berlin. She learns that her husband, Johnny, might have had something to do with her arrest, but when she finally locates him she’s shocked to discover he doesn’t seem to recognise her. He does, however, notice Nelly shares a striking resemblance to his late wife and proposes that she pretends to be her so they can divide her fortune. For some, the thought of not recognising your spouse is inconceivable. Ronald Zehrfeld, the actor who plays Johnny, was certainly unconvinced, but his director was resolute. “Each morning Ronald would say to me, ‘I must recognise her,’ and I said to him, ‘No!’” Petzold explains. “First of all you are guilty, secondly she is dead and you killed her! Many of my friends are lawyers... they always say the same thing: all the people who are guilty sitting in jail waiting for their verdict, these people hold on to the belief that they’re not guilty. They’re telling stories and tales to themselves all the time and they end up believing them.” With Phoenix, Petzold looks to examine the immediate ramifications of guilt that were prevalent in Germany, yet unlike other studies of
May 2015
post-war reparations he’s far more interested in the psychological repercussions. “When I was a student I read a lot of Freud,” he says. “I found it interesting when Freud said a traumatised person has to repeat the trauma. At first they need to remember the trauma, then repeat the trauma and then finally to destroy the trauma. It’s a little bit like the story of West Germany. You repeat a little bit, then you destroy it, then you can be free, without any guilt.” Phoenix’s meditation on guilt and sexual politics, combined with Johnny’s avaricious endeavour to transform Nelly into the woman she used to be, has led many critics to make comparisons with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which Petzold sees as a mixed blessing. To Petzold, a self-proclaimed fan of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, Phoenix is a film about female subjectivity as opposed to male subjectivity. Throughout his films, a female point of view has always been his default perspective and this preference means he’s developed a difficult relationship with Hitchcock’s masterpiece. “Kim Novak was intended as a substitute for Marilyn Monroe. The studios tried to create them like a laboratory, like mad scientists do. In our movie there’s no Kim Novak, no Marilyn Monroe and there’s no male subjectivity. I don’t want to see that again, this perverted male movie. Vertigo is one of my favourite films but sometimes I hate it.” Phoenix is Petzold and Nina Hoss’s sixth collaboration; he describes her involvement as an integral part of his creative process. “When I’m writing a script or planning a movie I’m like an architect who is designing a model of the house he’s going to build. In these models you always insert these little people. Nina is one of the people, except when she’s working she looks up at me and she’ll say, ‘What are you doing?’ Actually, when I work I’m a little bit like Johnny in the film. I give the actress costumes and make-up and say how they have to dance and how they have to move. But, like in Phoenix, after 45 minutes Nelly starts to become the director and I think this explains how we work.”
’m the perv,” says François Ozon with an impish smile. Those who know the French filmmaker’s work might be thinking to themselves, “Tell us something we don’t already know!” From his saucy debut, Sitcom, a Buñuelian satire in which a bourgeois family embrace their inner sexual deviance, to last year’s Young & Beautiful, an enigmatic study of a teenage call girl, Ozon has been making some of the most playfully provocative films in modern cinema. The enfant terrible, still fresh-faced at 47, isn’t discussing his reputation as a director, however. He’s referring to his cameo in his new film, The New Girlfriend, where he plays a cinema patron with wandering hands, who touches up David (Romain Duris), a recent widower who’s test driving his female alter-ego, Virginia, during a trip to the pictures. Ozon, having never appeared on screen himself, wasn’t sure he could pull off the scene, so he shot it twice: once with himself, and once with a professional actor in the role. Watching the two versions back-toback, the performance to go with was clear. “My editor said, ‘Romain is much better when he’s acting with you.’ And I realised it was true, so we kept my take. I asked Romain, ‘Why were you better with me?’ and he said, ‘Because you were really going for it – the other actor was afraid to really touch me.’ So I was a good actor,” he says with a sly chuckle. This cheeky director’s cameo is just the first of many nods in the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. We follow Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) as she discovers David, the husband of her deceased best friend, has taken to dressing up in his dead spouse’s clothes. Initially, it appears David’s cross-dressing is a way of bringing his wife back to life, although we suspect this isn’t his first time in garters. Whatever the reason, Claire is enlivened by having her BFF resurrected. “I love the idea in Vertigo of trying to bring back to life an old love – and that’s really the idea here,” Ozon says, referring to Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece. Given Claire is the one pulling
the strings, it’s with her the director most identifies. “Claire’s playing with her doll. She’s the one helping the man to become a woman. As a director, that’s my job: to transform Romain Duris into an actress.” Despite Duris’s slight frame and pretty features, this was no mean feat. “The idea in the film was not to make Romain the perfect woman; he’s what he is.” What did appeal to Ozon about Duris was his energy. “He was like a child, and that’s what I wanted from the film. I wanted someone who could have fun with the scenes between Virginia and Claire.” In fact, Duris felt more comfortable performing as his character’s female side. “It’s easier to play [Virginia] because you have the costumes, you have the wig,” he says. “But very often Romain would say to me, ‘Who is David? What do I do?’” The secret to unlocking the character, Ozon explains, was to realise this was a film about freedom: “The freedom to become yourself, to find your own identity and maybe to escape the gender that society and your family want you to be.” This is typical Ozon: in his movies, gender and sexuality are often in flux. Ozon slips from genre to genre with a similar fluidity. To guess what he might tackle next on his circuitous filmmaking path is like throwing a dice. He’s given most genres a try: thrillers (Swimming Pool), tragic dramas (Under the Sand), camp melodramas (Potiche), comic chamber pieces (Water Drops on Burning Rocks). “I’m open to many things,” says the writer-director. “I’m not sure that I would be able to make a western or a science fiction movie, but I like to play with genres.” Even while watching his films, Ozon’s genre is hard to pin down. His dramas easily slip into comedy while his candyfloss confections come wrapped in barbed wire. The New Girlfriend may be based on a Ruth Rendell potboiler, but Ozon seamlessly skips between tragedy and farce, erotic thriller and sex comedy. “Just call this a trans-genre movie,” he chuckles. The New Girlfriend is released 22 May by Metrodome
Phoenix is released 8 May by Soda Pictures
FILM
Feature
19
“I
Mistaken Identity The collaboration between German director Christian Petzold and Nina Hoss, his go-to leading lady, has proved one of the most artistically fruitful in contemporary cinema. Petzold discusses their latest film, Phoenix Interview: Patrick Gamble
D
espite making his debut 15 years ago, with The State I Am In, and being widely considered the most talented director of post-1989 Germany, Christian Petzold remains relatively unknown outside his native country. But all that’s about to change with the release of his latest film, Phoenix, a Hitchcockian thriller set in post-war Berlin. Petzold’s characters often find themselves in situations in which they must conceal a secret; they’re usually alienated, alone and struggling to escape Germany. For Petzold, it’s his nation’s default mode. “We have no songs in Germany,” he tells us. “The Nazis ruined them all. The only songs we have are pop songs from the 60s, but all these songs are about leaving Germany and how we’re all lonely. I think this desire to go away is very deep within the German soul.” In Phoenix, Petzold’s frequent collaborator Nina Hoss plays Nelly, a disfigured concentration camp survivor who, after major facial reconstruction, returns to Berlin. She learns that her husband, Johnny, might have had something to do with her arrest, but when she finally locates him she’s shocked to discover he doesn’t seem to recognise her. He does, however, notice Nelly shares a striking resemblance to his late wife and proposes that she pretends to be her so they can divide her fortune. For some, the thought of not recognising your spouse is inconceivable. Ronald Zehrfeld, the actor who plays Johnny, was certainly unconvinced, but his director was resolute. “Each morning Ronald would say to me, ‘I must recognise her,’ and I said to him, ‘No!’” Petzold explains. “First of all you are guilty, secondly she is dead and you killed her! Many of my friends are lawyers... they always say the same thing: all the people who are guilty sitting in jail waiting for their verdict, these people hold on to the belief that they’re not guilty. They’re telling stories and tales to themselves all the time and they end up believing them.” With Phoenix, Petzold looks to examine the immediate ramifications of guilt that were prevalent in Germany, yet unlike other studies of
May 2015
post-war reparations he’s far more interested in the psychological repercussions. “When I was a student I read a lot of Freud,” he says. “I found it interesting when Freud said a traumatised person has to repeat the trauma. At first they need to remember the trauma, then repeat the trauma and then finally to destroy the trauma. It’s a little bit like the story of West Germany. You repeat a little bit, then you destroy it, then you can be free, without any guilt.” Phoenix’s meditation on guilt and sexual politics, combined with Johnny’s avaricious endeavour to transform Nelly into the woman she used to be, has led many critics to make comparisons with Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which Petzold sees as a mixed blessing. To Petzold, a self-proclaimed fan of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, Phoenix is a film about female subjectivity as opposed to male subjectivity. Throughout his films, a female point of view has always been his default perspective and this preference means he’s developed a difficult relationship with Hitchcock’s masterpiece. “Kim Novak was intended as a substitute for Marilyn Monroe. The studios tried to create them like a laboratory, like mad scientists do. In our movie there’s no Kim Novak, no Marilyn Monroe and there’s no male subjectivity. I don’t want to see that again, this perverted male movie. Vertigo is one of my favourite films but sometimes I hate it.” Phoenix is Petzold and Nina Hoss’s sixth collaboration; he describes her involvement as an integral part of his creative process. “When I’m writing a script or planning a movie I’m like an architect who is designing a model of the house he’s going to build. In these models you always insert these little people. Nina is one of the people, except when she’s working she looks up at me and she’ll say, ‘What are you doing?’ Actually, when I work I’m a little bit like Johnny in the film. I give the actress costumes and make-up and say how they have to dance and how they have to move. But, like in Phoenix, after 45 minutes Nelly starts to become the director and I think this explains how we work.”
’m the perv,” says François Ozon with an impish smile. Those who know the French filmmaker’s work might be thinking to themselves, “Tell us something we don’t already know!” From his saucy debut, Sitcom, a Buñuelian satire in which a bourgeois family embrace their inner sexual deviance, to last year’s Young & Beautiful, an enigmatic study of a teenage call girl, Ozon has been making some of the most playfully provocative films in modern cinema. The enfant terrible, still fresh-faced at 47, isn’t discussing his reputation as a director, however. He’s referring to his cameo in his new film, The New Girlfriend, where he plays a cinema patron with wandering hands, who touches up David (Romain Duris), a recent widower who’s test driving his female alter-ego, Virginia, during a trip to the pictures. Ozon, having never appeared on screen himself, wasn’t sure he could pull off the scene, so he shot it twice: once with himself, and once with a professional actor in the role. Watching the two versions back-toback, the performance to go with was clear. “My editor said, ‘Romain is much better when he’s acting with you.’ And I realised it was true, so we kept my take. I asked Romain, ‘Why were you better with me?’ and he said, ‘Because you were really going for it – the other actor was afraid to really touch me.’ So I was a good actor,” he says with a sly chuckle. This cheeky director’s cameo is just the first of many nods in the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. We follow Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) as she discovers David, the husband of her deceased best friend, has taken to dressing up in his dead spouse’s clothes. Initially, it appears David’s cross-dressing is a way of bringing his wife back to life, although we suspect this isn’t his first time in garters. Whatever the reason, Claire is enlivened by having her BFF resurrected. “I love the idea in Vertigo of trying to bring back to life an old love – and that’s really the idea here,” Ozon says, referring to Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece. Given Claire is the one pulling
the strings, it’s with her the director most identifies. “Claire’s playing with her doll. She’s the one helping the man to become a woman. As a director, that’s my job: to transform Romain Duris into an actress.” Despite Duris’s slight frame and pretty features, this was no mean feat. “The idea in the film was not to make Romain the perfect woman; he’s what he is.” What did appeal to Ozon about Duris was his energy. “He was like a child, and that’s what I wanted from the film. I wanted someone who could have fun with the scenes between Virginia and Claire.” In fact, Duris felt more comfortable performing as his character’s female side. “It’s easier to play [Virginia] because you have the costumes, you have the wig,” he says. “But very often Romain would say to me, ‘Who is David? What do I do?’” The secret to unlocking the character, Ozon explains, was to realise this was a film about freedom: “The freedom to become yourself, to find your own identity and maybe to escape the gender that society and your family want you to be.” This is typical Ozon: in his movies, gender and sexuality are often in flux. Ozon slips from genre to genre with a similar fluidity. To guess what he might tackle next on his circuitous filmmaking path is like throwing a dice. He’s given most genres a try: thrillers (Swimming Pool), tragic dramas (Under the Sand), camp melodramas (Potiche), comic chamber pieces (Water Drops on Burning Rocks). “I’m open to many things,” says the writer-director. “I’m not sure that I would be able to make a western or a science fiction movie, but I like to play with genres.” Even while watching his films, Ozon’s genre is hard to pin down. His dramas easily slip into comedy while his candyfloss confections come wrapped in barbed wire. The New Girlfriend may be based on a Ruth Rendell potboiler, but Ozon seamlessly skips between tragedy and farce, erotic thriller and sex comedy. “Just call this a trans-genre movie,” he chuckles. The New Girlfriend is released 22 May by Metrodome
Phoenix is released 8 May by Soda Pictures
FILM
Feature
19
