“Mirrors No. 3” by Christian Petzold: in double waters

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In a sober and bucolic setting, the film by German director Christian Petzold accurately explores the encounter between a young pianist and a grieving sixty-year-old woman.

"Mirror No. 3" tells the story of the strange cohabitation between two women. (Les films du Losange)

If Christian Petzold's cinema has long been dominated by the grayness of contemporary German history – which a retrospective at the Cinémathèque française currently allows us to verify – his faithful collaboration with the actress Paula Beer has definitely allowed the emergence of a more summery color, to which Miroirs no. 3 is no exception. This latest opus adopts, like the Red Sky before him, the modest trappings of a small-scale film, centered on a handful of settings lost in the countryside: it is in this little corner of nowhere bathed in gentle sunshine that Laura, a young pianist passing by in the car with her companion, happens to cross paths with Betty, a sixty-year-old separated from her family and living alone in a small house by the side of the road.

Something seems, in this fleeting moment, to connect the two women. To the point that, convalescing after a car accident that killed her boyfriend, Laura decides to stay and live with Betty. Betty accepts, without asking for an explanation, and welcomes the young woman into her bucolic shack. Almost instinctively, two solitudes seem to recognize each other: Laura was looking for a way out of a dysfunctional relationship (he