Myth and romance mingle in "Undine'

    It takes near foolhardy courage to make a contemporary romance that wraps present-day realities around a fairy-tale spine. Director Christian Petzold (Transit) takes the dare with Undine, the story of the relationship between an industrial diver (Franz Rogowski) and Undine (Paula Beer), a woman who delivers lectures about the history of Berlin.

    Oh, and by the way, Undine is a water nymph.

    Rogowski's meets Undine after she's been ditched by Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), a jerk who we later learn is married and cheating on his wife. 

    Rogowski and Beer light sparks as their romance plays against a backdrop of daily life. If you know the Undine myth, you know that Undine is fated to kill any lover who's unfaithful to her. 

   Confident in his approach, Petzold makes no apologies for the movie's folkloric elements, allowing them to turn up in the midst of a story based in Berlin and the surrounding countryside. He presents the mythical without fanfare. 

   The movie’s appeal has less to do with its story or any mythology than with the charm of its two leads, with the poise Petzold brings to his filmmaking and the grace notes he sounds. 

    Watching Christoph welding underwater as he helps repair a turbine immerses us in a dark silent world of mystery. 

    Petzold's story includes elements of deceit and vengeance but also reaches for exalted levels of devotional love, the kind that you might expect to find on an opera stage.

   At its best, Undine flows and floats its way through an unconventional story that like the models of Berlin that Undine uses for her lectures knows that many layers lie beneath its contemporary surface.

On the run from a fascist invasion

The German movie Transit takes a story from the 1940s and plunges it into an uncertain present.

Some films demand a high degree of trust from an audience right from the start. That's certainly the case with German director Christian Petzold's Transit, a movie that tries to disorient us in almost every possible way. Petzold makes it unclear when his story is taking place and blurs the national identity of some of his protagonists. In movie terms, Petzold also stirs a pot thick with traces of other movies: Whiffs of Casablanaca and various Holocaust movies ripple through Transit like suddenly-remembered dreams.

Uncertainty serves the movie, which qualifies as an intriguing and perhaps necessary movie of the moment, a look at the dangers of fascism and how the arrival of a new Holocaust -- in this movie called "a cleansing" -- might impact the lives of individuals forced into dangerous games of deception.

The movie also asks a provocative question: How might love look in such a roiled political climate?

Petzold, who wrote the movie's screenplay, bases his story on a 1944 novel by the German/Jewish writer Anna Seghers, dropping the author's tale into what seems (and I emphasize the word "seems") like the present. Whatever the time period, various people are trying to outrun a fascist government that apparently has invaded France and plans to eliminate those parts of the population it deems unworthy.

Georg (Franz Rogowski), the movie's main character, travels from Paris to Marseilles where most of the movie takes place. Georg hopes to escape death by obtaining papers that will allow him to emigrate to Mexico. To do this, Georg assumes the identity of a writer who recently committed suicide in Paris.

In Marseilles, Georg meets the writer's wife (Paula Beer), a woman who doesn't yet know that she's a widow. Beer's Marie has taken up with a physician (Godehard Giese), a doctor who's deeply conflicted about escaping France. If he accepts a foreign post that he's been offered, he thinks he'll be betraying Marie, with whom he's fallen in love.

For her part, Marie can't obtain the necessary papers to leave France until her husband turns up, which we know isn't about to happen.

Georg also becomes entangled in the lives of a North African immigrant (Maryam Zaree) and her needy young son (Lilien Batman). Absent a father, the boy desperately wants a man in his life. Georg becomes increasingly torn. Should he head for the hills with the boy and his mother or pursue his own safety in Mexico?

Meanwhile, the fascist occupation moves inexorably toward Marseilles, a prospect that sustains a mood of danger and desperation.

As you might already have guessed, the experience of watching Transit -- beautifully filmed by cinematographer Hans Fromm -- can be confusing. Petzold creates an environment in which characters and audience become disoriented. Petzold asks us to go with the flow of his movie, believing that by the end, we'll know enough to make sense of what we're seeing. That's what I meant by my earlier mention of "trust."

It's worth noting some of the things Petzold doesn't do as he allows an unsettling vagueness to settle over everything. He never refers to Nazis, makes sure that the occupation of France feels murky enough to create doubt and never explains the movie's mixture of period and contemporary details.

Transit sometimes overdoes its lack of specificity, but Petzold's mix of plot and detail evoke both past and present while alerting us to the ways in which oppressive regimes ravage lives.

The gamble mostly pays off; Transit reminds us that no time is immune from disruptive dangers and that when things fall apart, finding a clear pathway to safety will be dauntingly difficult and morally challenging.

Returning home after the Holocaust

The German movie Phoenix is about trying to manage an unmanageable past.

Nelly Lenz survived Auschwitz, but was shot in the face sometime around the camp's liberation. With the rumble of war still echoing across the European landscape, Nelly returned to Berlin with a friend who had arranged for her to have reconstructive surgery.

In the hospital, a plastic surgeon asks Nelly whether she wants to pick a new face and by extension, a new identity. She insists that she wants to look exactly as she did before the war.

Obviously, any movie that begins like this -- as does the German movie Phoenix -- must invest every choice with symbolic meaning.

As an assimilated Jew prior to the war, does Nelly want to wipe the slate clean and start again? Will she cling to the past, even if it means denying how some of her German "friends" behaved during the war?

After her operation, Nelly -- played by Petzold regular Nina Hoss -- moves in with the friend (Nina Kunzendorf) who brought her to Berlin.

Kunzendorf's Lene suggests that the two leave Germany and move either to Haifa or Tel Aviv.

Nelly has another idea. She wants to find Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), the German to whom she was married before the war. Nelly had been a club singer: Johnny played piano.

It doesn't take long for Nelly to locate Johnny, who (we're asked to believe) doesn't recognize her. True, Nelly doesn't look precisely the same as before her surgery, but you'd think Johnny, would be smart enough to catch on.

He doesn't. Instead, he thinks that this woman -- who reminds him of his wife -- might help him pull off a scam. He'll instruct her until she knows how to behave like the wife he presumes to be dead. He'll then use this imposter to collect the substantial inheritance to which Nelly's entitled. They'll split the money, he says.

That's a lot of story, but director Christian Petzold handles it with relative ease, perhaps assuming that in the post-war rubble of Berlin, it's entirely possible that Nelly would find Johnny working in a nightclub called The Phoenix, and that he wouldn't know who she is.

Buy into all of that, and you'll find a well-acted movie that showcases Hoss's work as a woman whose motives and understanding of her situation aren't fully formed until the movie's quietly powerful ending.

Hoss worked with Petzold on two previous movies ( Barbara and Yella), so it's no surprise that she skillfully convey's both Nelly's fragility and her determination.

Petzold devotes much of the movie to the ways in which Johnny tries to remake Nelly into the image of his wife without ever realizing that she actually is his wife.

At times, the movie almost seems as if it could have been a play, two characters mired in a game that raises deep questions about responsibility and guilt.

Petzold doesn't totally conquer the inherent unlikelihood of the movie's central conceit, but uses it to create a challenging portrait of post-war Germany.

He also benefits greatly from Hoss's performance as a woman who essentially has been eradicated from everything she knew -- and yet remains to look at the terrible aftermath.