Miroirs No. 3

Part of my coverage of the 61st Chicago International Film Festival

MIROIRS NO. 3   **1/2

Christian Petzold

2025

IDEA:  After surviving a car crash in rural Germany, a young woman decides to stay with the elder woman who witnessed the accident.

BLURB:  Miroirs No. 3 is set in a small rural German town that simultaneously gives off the air of a fairytale idyll and a pastoral purgatory. Petzold holds these qualities in gentle dialectical tension, suggesting the murky space where emotional comfort morphs into psychological stasis. Can you go back home after a tragedy? Should you? Nothing is ever clear in Petzold’s taciturn story, in which his quartet of main characters float around each other tentatively putting up bridges — familial, possibly romantic — that never quite line up. There is a pointed gendered divide between the surrogate mother-daughter pairing, who are associated with housework, and the men of the family, who spend all their time in a garage fixing cars. Without necessarily reasserting stereotypes, Petzold indicates a fundamental rift in the ways women and men communicate, or don’t. His approach is spartan, at times recalling Bresson in its stark (albeit color-saturated) mise en scène and withholding of information. The issue is that he too-often confuses the mere act of reticence for human mystery, with silences and elisions that are more empty than pregnant. Miroirs No. 3 just doesn’t give the spectator much to hang onto, although its short-story-like nature at least lends it a pleasing brevity.