Phoenix * 1/2

This film is incredible!  Really, it’s just incredible. So I don’t know why they expect us to believe it. It has no credibility. Didn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. Wouldn’t happen.

I mean really, 1945 and plastic surgery so good not even your ex-husband recognises you?!  (I once saw a documentary on plastic surgery in the Forties and the results were not pretty).

But aside from that, Phoenix is boring.  Probably the most boring film I have seen this year with a “surprise ending” that brought an epiphany to some of the actors but just another boring scene for us.

A woman is shipped away to Auschwitz in the war.  Her horrible husband has shopped her to Das Nazis for being Jewish.  She is shot in the face and is then given plastic surgery after the war with a result that would make a modern Hollywood practitioner weep with envy and admiration. (All that skill but he doesn’t get round to taking the tattoo off her arm).

She returns to Berlin keen to meet her ex again, not knowing what a bastard he’s been. He doesn’t know it’s her (Oh Come on! One recognises their partner by more than their face!).  He has been hoping to get her money.  He was due to get a squillion when she dies but it’s hard to prove your benefactor died in a concentration camp.  So he has a plan and asks her to help. The money is in trust. Thinking she looks a bit like his ex he suggests she can prove she is still alive, get the money out and they can split it.  He doesn't know that she really is his ex-wife.

I suppose if it was told in a bouncy entertaining way, where we agree to put away our common sense for the sake of a good yarn it would be okay: but Phoenix is dour, humourless, glum and pretentiously serious.

Anyway don’t listen to me.  What would I know?  I have to question myself and ask myself what am I missing or what is wrong with me to find a film that has received near ecstatic reviews as a dull, plodding, waste of two hours with a very poor pay-off.

But at least I can keep my thoughts to myself and nod in agreement when people say  “It’s incredible.”