Miroirs No 3

Miroirs no 3

After a car crash kills her boyfriend, piano student Laura is taken in by Betty, who witnessed the accident. Living with Betty's family brings comfort, but Laura starts questioning their intentions as time passes. A modern gothic fairytale about the lies we tell ourselves and the strange ways that grief, connection, and humanity bind and sustain us.

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Reviews

It is highly diverting, elegantly contrived study of an unhappy family group and the cuckoo in its nest.

 

Peter Bradshaw

Guardian

There may be faint echoes of Vertigo (1958) menace in Miroirs’ second half, but as the yellows of late summer days turn ochre, we drift into a deceptively soothing narrative arc. There are clues and there is a reveal, but more importantly, Petzold tries out an algebra of relationships that is new for him, namely that ‘3+1=2+2’ and that a single look of recognition has the power to save a life. 

 

 Savina Petkova

Sight and Sound

Beer’s reserved performance... is the kind of acting that rarely wins awards precisely because it feels real rather than theatrical, no grand gestures, no visible working, just a woman you believe completely.

 

Kaleem Aftab

Time Out
Miroirs no 3

Thoughts

A young pianist is in a car accident in the German countryside. The woman who witnessed it takes her home to recover. The house is comfortable and slightly neglected, the family in it is polite, and the arrangement of the rooms suggests someone who is no longer there. The pianist stays. Nobody quite says why.

Petzold's account of his own premise: a young woman in crisis arrives among people who have been damaged, they give her the wrong identity, and the wrong identity is what heals her. He also wanted a film with no mirrors in it, on the grounds that the whole situation is the mirror, with a dead girl looking back through it. Placed after Bergman and Altman, this is a contemporary and gentler answer to both. Where Persona is a struggle and 3 Women a theft, Miroirs No 3 is something closer to finding a mutuality, an arrangement between two people who both need it and neither of whom will discuss it. Note that Laura is another character who barely speaks, and in a season full of people talking past or even through each other, she is the one who has another instrument.