by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $19.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Enno Trebs, Philip Froissant
Intro:
… less concerned with resolution than with resonance.
Mirrors No. 3 by Christian Petzold, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, is an intimate chamber piece from the most humane director of the Berlin School. Piano student Laura sets off for a countryside weekend in a convertible with her boyfriend Jakob and a couple of friends. From the very beginning, however, something feels off: Laura seems distracted, lost, weighed down by something unspoken.
In a village near Berlin, she tells Jakob that she wants to go back home. He is displeased but agrees to drive her. A sudden car accident kills Jakob, while Laura is found by a local woman, Betty. After being examined by a doctor, Laura tells the police that she wants to stay with Betty. The woman is surprised, yet seems quietly pleased. Soon, she introduces Laura to her husband and her adult son. Thus begins a chain of small, seemingly ordinary events through which it becomes clear that Laura is far from the strangest or most unhappy character in this story.
Christian Petzold’s films have always been the warmest among the works of his peers, from Angela Schanelec and Thomas Arslan to Isabelle Stever and Christoph Hochhäusler. No matter how piercing and sad Undine — his urban variation on Andersen’s The Little Mermaid — may be, it still arrives at a luminous ending. In Mirrors No. 3, the role of Laura is played by Petzold’s new muse Paula Beer (previously, he most often cast his wife Nina Hoss in leading roles), who has appeared in four of his most recent films. Betty is portrayed by the seasoned Barbara Auer, who also appeared in Transit, while her son Max is played by Enno Trebs, known from Afire (and who, incidentally, began his acting career as a teenager in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon).
Although Petzold has assembled his favourite ensemble and the performances are remarkable, the most important achievement is how precisely he channels this collective talent. What begins as a simple story about Betty’s loss of her daughter and an unconscious attempt to replace her with Laura, gradually turns into a luminous elegy of hope, set to the sounds of a Chopin prelude and the pop hit “Night” by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. Even though Betty never truly finds her daughter in Laura, and Max never finds a sister or a lover, this is a story about how a chance encounter between strangers can quietly overturn a life.
It is a story of accidentally caught glances, awkward smiles, plum cake, and a broken dishwasher. It is simply a story about life itself — one that may seem dull and plotless to some, yet can give others the strength to face a new day.
Ultimately, Mirrors No. 3 is less concerned with resolution than with resonance. Petzold does not offer easy catharsis or neat emotional closure; instead, he lingers on the fragile, almost invisible moments in which lives briefly intersect and subtly change one another. In this quiet space between loss and continuation, the film suggests that healing does not come from replacement, but from recognition — from the simple act of being seen. What remains is a feeling of tentative hope: not the promise that wounds will disappear, but the understanding that even in the aftermath of tragedy, life can still unfold, gently and unexpectedly, in the company of others.
