Miroirs No. 3
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes
Stars: Paula Beer, Philip Froissant, Barbara Auer
Writer/Director: Christian Petzold
Reviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival
When French composer Maurice Ravel wrote the third movement of his piano suite Miroirs (“Mirrors”), he subtitled it “A Boat on the Ocean.” It’s a fitting reference — in both the title and soundtrack — for this turbulent drama about a family, fairly drowning in grief, thrown an unexpected lifeline by a young woman who literally crashes into the middle of their domestic crisis.
Laura (Paula Beer, an actress with the come-hither attitude of Nicole Kidman and the wide-eyed vulnerability of Olivia Colman), is on a weekend countryside jaunt with her insufferable boyfriend and his haughty friends. A promising and sensitive Berlin piano student, she’s clearly too good for these losers.
And so, we’re not terribly upset when Laura is hurled clear of a fatal car crash that instantly kills her boyfriend (wear your seatbelts, kids). She is found by Betty (The Book Thief’s Barbara Auer), a woman who lives in a nearby farm house. Miraculously, Laura is largely unhurt. Curiously, as the local paramedics cart off what’s left of her boyfriend, they agree that it would be a good idea for the physically and emotionally shaken Laura to stay at Betty’s for a few days.
At first, writer/director Christian Petzold pretends that this will be Laura’s story. She’s the one with the obvious boatload of conflicts: Doubt about her music career; clear difficulties relating to other people; residual emotional trauma from her accident. But then there’s the weird moment when Betty calls Laura by the wrong name. And the way Betty keeps staring at Laura when she thinks she’s not looking.
Petzold tries to sustain the mystery regarding Betty’s odd behavior a tad too long; we instinctively sense Laura reminds Betty of someone from her past. Not until Betty’s estranged husband, Richard, and son, Jakob (Matthias Brandt and Philip Froissant), drop by for dinner does the narrative morph into what we’ve been expecting for the past 20 minutes or so: a portrait of a family caught between the trauma of loss and the hope of healing.
Despite her budding musical career back in Berlin — or perhaps because of it — Laura stays put with Betty for what seems like weeks. Richard becomes something of a surrogate, if emotionally distant, father. She finds herself attracted to handsome, introspective Jakob, who seems inclined to return Laura’s affection until, at the worst possible moment, he comes to a horrifying, unspoken realization. We get it immediately; Laura, for some reason, remains clueless.
It’s Laura’s lack of curiosity that threatens to undermine Miroirs No 3: Just one or two well-placed questions would resolve everything about this family mystery. But for some reason she seems either too discerning to ask, or else she’s just not a very curious individual.
Still, the cast’s marvelously understated performances infuse Miroirs No 3 with a wispy, sustained sense of mystery. As Laura finally sits down at a keyboard for the film’s coda, both her frustrations and ours melt into Ravel’s rolling arpeggio waves.
Forget the grisly details; Miroirs No 3, the film, is most interested in exploring the ways people tiptoe around the chasms in their lives, rather than try to bridge them.
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