Rating: 4/5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 50/52 | 2010s
It’s just after World War II. Lene Winter drives her friend Nelly Lenz through a border checkpoint from Switzerland to Germany. Nelly sits in the passenger seat, her face wrapped in bloody bandages. The American soldier demands to see Nelly’s face. She unwraps it. We don’t see, but the soldier apologizes and lets them pass.
In Berlin, Lene takes Nelly to a reconstructive plastic surgeon—a bullet wound to the face that Nelly miraculously survived. The German surgeon asks why a Jewish woman would return to the country. Still, he gives Nelly some face options. Nelly wishes to look like she used to—he tells her that, no matter what, she won’t be precisely the same, and perhaps a new face will be an advantage. Still, Nelly does not relent in her wish.
Nelly was a cabaret singer, performing in London up to 1938. Nelly’s entire family is dead. As a result, Nelly stands to inherit a substantial sum of money. She asks about Johnny, but Lene refuses to give her anything. Under anesthesia, Nelly dreams of herself, dressed in the Auschwitz prisoner uniform, arriving at the boat house where she hid and seeing Johnny.
While Nelly recovers, Lene finds an apartment in Haifa, where Nelly can see the sea. Nelly doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror when the bandages come off. For all intents and purposes, Nelly is dead to the world. In an old photo, she sees herself as she was, but she also sees the dead and the covert Nazis.
The film follows Nelly’s search for Johnny and her longing to return to what it once was. It begins at a nightclub called the Phoenix.
The film uses Nelly’s changed face to discuss postwar Jewish identity. The German doctor gives Nelly the option to look less Jewish. Lene wants them to travel to Palestine and help create a Jewish state—to “take back what is theirs” so they can finally “be safe.” Johnny, who does not recognize Nelly, asks her to impersonate Nelly and help him claim her inheritance.
Regardless, Nelly has little to no agency in her story. She does not see herself as Jewish anymore, yet dangerous people will see it differently. She carries stories of her experiences in the camp that no one wants to hear. We all have lies about ourselves and others in our heads—molds of what we are willing to see and, more importantly, what we refuse to see. We return to people who hurt us because we want to relive the past—not good, but familiar.
The film consistently plays with mistaken identity. Nelly first finds a different Johnny, who robs her. A soldier at the bar hits on her, only to be told she’s the “wrong girl.” And, of course, despite all evidence to the contrary, Johnny cannot see his wife in the woman who writes like her, fits her clothes and shoes, and has the same-colored eyes.
If you’re looking for realism, you’ll likely be disappointed. Despite the setting and period, this film functions in the world of metaphor and melodrama. If you can get on board for Vertigo, then this shouldn’t be a problem.