Raft

Miroirs No. 3 (2025) - Petzold Christian Petzold, after many recent films with diverse themes and genres, goes back to the theme of his earlier films (The State I am In, Ghosts and Barbara) - the concept of family with Miroirs No. 3. When I talked with him after his film Barbara (2015) came out, this is what he told me about the theme of his films back then:

"Say, there is a shipwreck, and people are scrounging up to build a raft out of what's left over. Since 2000, all my movies are about this structural collapse (both economic and familial) and people trying to build a lifeboat to survive. So what's happening on the raft.... All these films, they are trying to rebuild something you can live with, out of the ruins.... We have to find little survival structures and I think that's what my movies are about."

With the world that seems more chaotic than ever - genocide in Gaza and Sudan, prolonged war in Ukraine, periodic school shootings and political violence and intensifying commercial colonialsm, I believe Petzold is looking inwards, and finding that the concept of family more important as ever.

Petzold is a master storyteller and it's not uncommon that everything he does has elaborate back stories. He chose Miroirs No. 3 as a title of his new film from Composer Maurice Ravel's 5 piece piano suite Miroirs. No.3 being titled Une barque sur l’océan/A Boat on the Ocean. Hence, the film about a makeshift family, completely makes sense.

The film concerns a music student Laura (Petzold's frequent collaborator, Paula Beer). She is seen a little disoriented in her surroundings, lost in her thoughts near the water's edge. When she gets to her apartment, her boyfriend, Jacob, and other couple friends are waiting for her. They are supposed to go away to the countryside. While being driven in the car, she notices an older woman Betty (Barbara Auer, also a Petzold alum) on the side of the road. As if she had a premonition, at a gas stop, Laura tells Jacob that she wants to go back home. Disappointed Jacob relents to her demands. He will drive her to the nearby train station to go back home.

On the way to the station, Laura notices Betty again and the car crashes. Jacob's dead but Laura is unscathed. Betty runs to the crash site and Laura, for some reason, wants to stay with Betty in her empty house indefinitely. It turns out Betty lost her daughter to suicide and her family broke apart. She was in a mental hospital and her mechanic husband Richard (another Petzold regular, Mathias Brandt) and their son Max (Enno Trebs), moved out. She was painting picket fences of her house while witnessing Laura's car crash. Not knowing Betty's family history story, Laura and Betty carry on their living arrangement.

With Laura staying in Betty's untouched dead daughter's room, the two women fall into daily routine - gardening and cooking, while some neighbors gossip outside their house. Laura insists on cooking for Betty's family and they invite Richard and Max, who reluctantly come. "Betty's off her medication," Richard and Max say in their worried voices and sideway glances. Then they meet Laura and get warmed up in her presence and they also carry on their daily routine. Laura visits them in their garage, riding their dead daughter's bike, fixing meals. As long as Betty's happy, they would carry on their make-believe family.

At various points, the family members attempt to tell Laura the truth. And when the truth comes out, it freaks out Laura. It's too creepy for her and her real father from Berlin picks her up. They would never see her again.

Music plays a pivotal role in Miroirs No. 3. It connects characters, not in a superficial, tugging at your heart strings way, but more of a shared experience, that unspoken acknowledgement and understanding among people. Petzold, in his usual economical ways, presents smaller, tighter films with only a few main actors and locations. In terms of scale, The film has the look and feel of his last film, Afire, taking place in a rural setting.

The melodic piano composition of Miroirs No. 3 reflects the sound of the gentle waves. Whatever the circumstances of the people who are lost at sea in that scenario, the music is soothing and calm, reflecting on the comfort of a family. The white picket fence that Betty is painting also reflects the yearning for ideal family life. As the title suggests, everything is a reflection of what should have been. It's the idea of a perfect family that haunts Petzold's characters, even though they never had it in the first place. And it is this tragedy in the modern world that Petzold keeps stressing with his films: yearning for the ideal world that never has materialized under the capitalist system.

Paula Beer is, as always, magnificent as a troubled young woman who is missing something in her life. So is Petzold regular Barbara Auer and Mathias Brandt in their roles as deeply scarred parents over the death of their child.

As usual, Petzold's Miroirs No. 3 is a compact, masterful filmmaking with affecting performances. One of the year's best.

Elegy to Cinema

Resurrection (2025) - Bi After the impossible feat of Long Days Journey into Night, his sophomore film partly shot in 3D, Bi Gan, the wunderkind of Chinese cinema, comes up with a sumptuous epic that tells the history of cinema's past, present and future spanning the whole 20th century in Resurrection. In a lumbering 2 hr 40 min runtime, the film is divided into 5 chapters with different actors playing the same character, Fantasmer/dreamer. You see, in the future, people live forever because they don't dream. Fantasmers, because of their ability to dream, they burn bright but they don't last long. Perhaps a century.

Bi, with Kaili Blue and Long Days, cultivated cinema as a waking dream with languorous filmic language with implausibly long takes and dreamlike atmosphere. Resurrection, its ironic title notwithstanding, is an elegy to the cinema and its history. It starts out with the title cards, mimicking old silent movies of the turn of the century. With production design right out of German Expressionism, with Big Other, a maternal figure, played by Shu Qi (of numerous Hou Hsiao Hsien films and Long Days Journey into Night), wakes Fantasmer (first played by Jackson Yee), an ogre like monster, from his slumber, to guide him through the century and send him off to his death at the end.

These dreams/stories moves from a mysterious murderer in a war time noir, then a smuggler meeting a spirit of bitterness in an abandoned old Buddhist temple, a con artist teaching a young girl card tricks for a big score, and a young punk falling in love with a vampire on the eve of the new century. Each elaborate chapter, dedicated to different senses, is shot in differing formats and styles, showcasing Bi's command of the artform.

And again, the 40-minute uncut last section of the film, spanning night to dawn, is a jaw-dropping cinematic feat that really needs to be seen to be believed. Taking place in and out of squalid urban slum by the water, camera follows two would be young lovers as they enter various rooms, industrial landscapes, seedy shops, and a nightclub filled with people, all captured in fluid motion of the camera gimbal in one take (shot by DP Dong Jingsong of Wild Goose Lake, Long Days Journey into Night). To make things even more incredible, POV changes in mid take to an all powerful mob boss who sings in a karaoke bar, who ends up stabbing our protagonist multiple times.

References are everywhere from Murnau to Wong Kar-wai to Jean Vigo and I'm sure there's a lot I didn't catch in my first viewing. But Resurrection is a staggering work of an artist with means (backed by CG Cinema and Arte France) to go big or go broke. While the premise being thin, Resurrection is a towering artistic achievement above the sea of mediocre offerings in the state of world cinema right now.

Commercial Colonialism

The Fence (2025) - Denis Taking place in one night, Claire Denis's new film The Fence charts both familiar and new territories for the 77-year old master filmmaker. Set in a fenced and heavily guarded industrial factory in an unnamed Western African country, The Fence once again invokes Denis's continued interests in post-colonial Africa (due to her upbringing in Cameroon) then and now.

Matt Dillon plays Horn, a grizzled foreman of the factory, who is in charge of workers. Except for his young lieutenant Carl (Tom Blyth), all workers and guards in the compound are black. Earlier in the day, a black worker died in an accident. And the victim's brother Alboury (Isaach De Bankolé) appears outside the fence, to claim his brother's body. But Horn has a lot on his plate: it's the eve of the handover, a Chinese company is taking over the ownership in coming days, and his newly wedded young wife Leonie (Mia McKenna-Bruce) is soon arriving from Britain. He tries to wave off the grieving brother by offering money, also utters thinly veiled threats of violence, but Alboury won't budge from the spot until he gets the body of his brother back.

Through several tension-filled exchanges between Horn and Alboury, we gather that Horn is deliberately delaying the release of the body, that the death wasn't really an accident and hot-headed Carl was directly responsible for the death. It becomes pretty clear that Horn is not only covering for his company, but also protecting Carl, that there is something more than a boss-worker relationship between them.

To make matters worse. Leonie arrives in her high heels with big luggages. At first naive and innocent, Leonie catches on quickly with the tension filled surroundings. Something is not right: it's not only no air conditioning and a shared bathroom, but the fenced off compound doesn't feel safe, despite her husband's repeated assurance.

From her debut film Chocolat, Beau Travail to White Material, Denis examined the colonization and its aftermath of the African continent by white Europeans. Entitlement, guilt, violence and eroticism were all there. Then she made films depicting the African diaspora experience in No Fear, No Die, I can't Sleep and 35 Shots of Rum with her trademark grace and sensuality. With The Fence, (shot by veteran French cinematographer Eric Gautier, their third collaboration after Both Sides of the Blade and Stars at Noon), the political message here is much more blunt. In the beginning of the film, there's a surreal sequence of a vicious dog biting the flesh off of a human with his brain exposed. The film is based on Bernard-Marie Koltès's play Black Battles with Dogs. Bankolé addresses the audience directly- breaking the fourth wall, “Every White man’s dream.”

Matt Dillon who became an European cinema darling recently, and here working with Denis for the first time. He makes a perfect white American company man. Tom Blyth is great as a volatile young man, so is McKenna-Bruce as a quick witted gold digger thrown into the tense situation that she has no business to be part of. But it’s Denis’s frequent collaborator De Bankolé’s towering presence that makes the mark as the grieving brother of the deceased, who knows that the death wasn’t an accident. His weathered face and dignified stare speaks volumes alone.

The rich minerals needed for anywhere from smart phones and computers to nuclear weapons attract global conglomerates. This time, the African continent in the 21st century is under commercial colonialism. Appeasing the local population is not the company policy.

Main actors engaging in long dialog as if it is a stage play, the dialog in The Fence seems a little stilted and on the nose. But it makes the point across more clearly. It’s a film that is more direct in messaging while retaining the sensuality and lyricism Denis is known for.