One day when he was home with his sick four-year-old daughter, filmmaker Christian Petzold flipped on a James Bond movie — and noticed she was enraptured.
He has a theory about why: “James Bond can destroy everything,” Petzold muses, “and he doesn’t have to clean it up.”
Petzold’s latest film Miroirs No. 3 is — like all of his films — about the clean-up. The German filmmaker has spent two decades of arthouse filmmaking examining his country’s fractured relationship with its brutal history.
Barbara (2012), for which he won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin International Film Festival, told the story of an East German physician trying to flee West while being tailed by the Stasi. Transit (2018), another darling of the Berlin International Film Festival, starred Franz Rogowski as a refugee in a present-day fascist state.
The darkness of these movies might make you assume Petzold will conform to the stereotypes of the serious European director. But, like his films, the writer-director brims with warmth and generous curiosity. We’re barely into our conversation before he’s offered me part of his raisin scone — “Betty might have made this!” he comments as he breaks it in half.
Betty is a character in Miroirs, a film that examines the existential questions Petzold has long explored. He is interested in how people, especially women, survive in quietly dire circumstances.
It stars Petzold’s frequent collaborator, Paula Beer, as Laura, a young piano student who survives a car crash in the German countryside. Rather than return home to Berlin, she decides to recuperate with Betty, a kind stranger played by Barbara Auer. The two form a surrogate mother-daughter relationship as they restore Betty’s charming, if slightly dilapidated, home.
Miroirs No. 3 Director Christian Petzold on Two Types of Cinema
Miroirs studies the silent maintenance that women do to keep things together — Petzold’s rejection of the inherent wastefulness of capitalist consumer culture — and how quickly a home can fall apart in the shadow of tragedy.
“We have two types of cinema now,” Petzold says. “Cinema that desires dystopia, and cinema that desires repair.”
Miroirs belongs to the second cohort. After the film’s premiere at Cannes, some journalists were surprised by what they perceived as a detachment from contemporary politics. But Petzold has grown weary of didactic films that lecture audiences about things they already agree with.
“After 1945, the English and the Americans came to Germany with a mission to reeducate us.” Petzold explains. “That heritage lasts through today — we have movies where, from the first moment, you know who’s bad, who’s good. The characters say sentences that feel written by journalists.”
Still, it would be a mistake to call Miroirs apolitical: The past is felt painfully in each frame. History resides in the unspoken trauma that lingers in Betty’s house, and in the rusted tractors of the car repair lot where Betty’s husband, Richard (Matthias Brandt) and son, Max (Enno Trebs) work.
The men earn money by removing the GPS trackers on luxury vehicles, and conduct their business with a tight-lipped secrecy that recalls Petzold’s previous films about survivors of police states.
“The old structure would have been the father and son.” Petzold explains. “Something from the Bible. But Laura and Betty have rebuilt their world, and it’s all food, culture, books, nature. You never see Betty and Richard’s room. The house has no male traces.”
Miroirs’ predecessor, Afire (2023), is another domestic drama, in which an idyll is overshadowed by forest fires that blaze around a seaside town, and the knowledge that summer vacation can’t last forever.
Petzold has a history of working within duologies and trilogies, which he attributes to an unshakeable Protestant work ethic: “Protestants can’t enjoy anything. Each day making Undine was great, and after we edited the movie, I said to myself, ‘You can’t enjoy it now. You have to work.’ So I said, this is just the beginning of a series.”
It was Barbara Auer who said on the tenth day of shooting that air, not fire, was the main element in Miroirs. While wind can be a destructive force, it’s also regenerative: The German word lüften refers to “airing out a house” and is a collective practice across the country.
Petzold was inspired by a wind-blown scene in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s The Wild Pear Tree (2018), even going as far as to rent wind machines. He didn’t need them, thanks to a cooperative natural breeze.
But air isn’t the only element. As in most of Petzold’s movies, rivers and bodies of water play a significant part.
“I grew up between two towns that have rivers of their own, Dusseldorf, the Rhine, and Wuppertal, the Wuppa,” Petzold says. “The Rhine is a big river with ships you can travel down. It’s like me with my bicycle, it represents a desire for the world. But the Wuppa is a winding river. There’s a sentence in German — über die Wuppa gehen. It means ‘to cross the Wuppa,’ but it’s also an expression that means to die.”
Call Me Huck
Fans of Petzold’s previous work will notice a small continuity between Miroirs and Barbara — in both films, a maternal figure relays a story from Tom Sawyer to a younger woman.
“There are three or four books in my childhood that changed my life, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were two of them. I wanted to be Huck. When I was seven years old, I made my brother call me Huck,” Petzold says.
“Both rivers, the Rhine and the Wuppa, are in Twain’s books. When Huck is rafting with Jim, it’s the Rhine, the river of adventure that can bring you far away. But there’s also the possibility that the river could be the river of tragedy, the Wuppa.”
The opening image of Miroirs of Laura standing at a Wuppa-like river was inspired by the young people Petzold saw wandering the streets of Berlin alone during Covid lockdowns.
“There were so many students from the U.S., from Spain, from France, living in Berlin during the pandemic, who were living here, but had no connections or social contacts because there was no university. When I was writing the script, I was always thinking about these students. And I wanted to make a movie that offered comfort,” he says.
Perhaps that’s why, despite the dark tragedies that haunt the main characters, Miroirs feels like the warmest of Petzold’s films. As our conversation draws to a close, Petzold expresses one last frustration with the current state of the world and its reflection in cinema.
“I must say. I’m through this shit Trump fascist thing. I can’t stand their words or their dystopian movements anymore,” he says. “To show just four people who can repair something — that is the only thing we can wish for. To repair, and to live on.”
Miroirs No. 3 is now in theaters from 1-2 Special.
Main image: Paula Beer as Laura in Miroirs No. 3 by director Christian Petzold. Photo courtesy of 1-2 Special.