As WW2 ends German former nightclub singer Nelly is shot as she leaves Auschwitz and her face is severely disfigured. When she arrives back home to a war-torn Berlin, her best friend Lene takes control and whisks her off to see the best plastic surgeon money can buy. With all her Jewish family now dead as a result of the Nazi’s genocide, Nelly is a wealthy heiress and the next thing on her schedule after getting a new face, is to stake a claim to her inheritance, and buy an apartment in Palestine and leave Germany for good.
He fails to recognize her at all, but mistaking her for someone who is just looking for a job, he suggests that as she bears a passing resemblance to ‘Nelly his wife’ that she should pretend to be her in order for him to claim her inheritance for himself. As Johnny sets about training Nelly to impersonate herself he has absolutely no inkling of the truth, or even note that despite the fact he is a real rogue, that she is totally in love with him.
This wonderfully detailed snapshot of a Germany that is just starting to come to terms with the end of the war which has devastated the country and its people themselves is helmed by writer/director Christian Petzold. It reunites him with his favorite actress Nina Hoss yet again, and together the two of them uniquely capture the essence of a trouble nation trying to get itself together after all of the trauma of war through this very simple story. Hoss gives a powerful performance as Nelly desperately trying to resist getting a new face or a new life as she wants to re-kindle something that was so far from perfect the first time around. Husband Johnny is played forcefully by Ronald Zehrfeld who also starred with Hoss in Petzold’s East German tale “Barbara” that was his country’s official submission for a Best Foreign Picture Oscar Nomination in 2012.
The beauty of this particular piece is in the rather triumphant and somewhat unexpected ending which once again simply reminds what an extraordinary team that these three really are.
