But in the work Petzold has produced since, some of that steely erudition has given way to surprising warmth and whimsy: “Undine” (2020), “Afire” (2023), and “Miroirs” feel almost like fairy tales. Even the colors are more vivid. Paula Beer, who has starred in all three, took notice of the shift. “I do feel that he’s needing something else,” she told me. “He’s looking for—not more drama, but more of something from the heart, that goes to the heart.” Her first collaboration with Petzold was “Transit,” which he had initially conceived with Farocki. It took him at least three years to make, including what he described to me as “two years of grief.” Beer, in an interview from that time, said, “After Harun passed away, he couldn’t continue working on the script.” To move forward, he had to renovate it completely—to clear the ghosts away. He set the adaptation in present-day France, and hasn’t made a period piece since.
Petzold’s work with Farocki hinged on substitutions and decoys—in “Ghosts,” from 2005, a mother becomes convinced that a young orphan is her long-lost daughter; two years later in “Yella,” a woman meets a stranger who eerily resembles her abusive, estranged husband, presumed dead—and tended to end abruptly, depriving the bereaved of resolution. After Farocki’s death, the structure of these stories changed: characters stuck around long enough to begin tending to the wounds that left them searching in the first place. Petzold’s fixation with replacement gave way to an interest in repair.
A you-are-what-you-do transmutation akin to the one in “Phoenix” also unfolds in “Miroirs.” This time, Petzold addresses its limitations. Betty, attempting to paper over her unthinkable loss, dresses Laura in her daughter’s clothes, gives her her daughter’s place at family meals, has her daughter’s bike fixed to Laura’s height. In a climactic sequence, she encourages her to play her daughter’s piano. Laura settles in with the secondhand sheet music: Chopin’s Prelude in E Minor, the bare, brooding requiem that was played at the composer’s funeral. The family, reunited, is situated around the living room like a painting, mother and father seated side by side on the couch; brother slouched against the doorjamb; daughter with her back to them, facing the wall as her fingers glide across the keys. In the dead girl’s clothes, her face obscured, Laura is, for a moment, not herself. Then, the repetitive descending melody is interrupted and restarts; in this musical rupture the trance is broken. She is not their daughter. Auer, as Betty, offers a fleet, brutal portrait of a mother moving through grief, weepily passing from denial to acceptance. At last, the family is mourning together. The final emotional marking on Chopin’s score is smorzando—dying away.
Petzold has a home, as he had always dreamt, full of art. He and his wife, the political documentarian Aysun Bademsoy, have written countless movies and raised two children there. The furniture in his study is mid-century modern, all brown and black leather, offering the room the sleekly urbane feel of an analyst’s office. (Petzold himself has tried therapy only once but was “so bored I decided to live on with panic attacks.”) The walls are outfitted with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, which store thousands of scrupulously alphabetized books—critical theory, Taschens, biographies, and fiction, dominated by translated English novels, Henry James, Patricia Highsmith, Cormac McCarthy, as he thinks “America has the best literature”—as well as a robust physical media collection of CDs, vinyl records, and DVDs.