For all its noir undertones and post WWII setting, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix has more in common with a classic musical than anything else. In Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady (inspired by George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion) professor of phonetics Henry Higgins, declares he can transform Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle into a “real lady” in six months. He succeeds partially, for in the end Eliza is left in existential limbo, she’s a creature that no longer belongs anywhere recognizable to her. In Petzold’s chamber drama, Nelly (Nina Hoss) is a concentration camp survivor who is left disfigured, and after undergoing a successful surgery (a recreation, not a reconstruction as her doctor explains) she tries to reclaim the life that was stolen from her by reconnecting with her husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld), who fails to recognize her but sees her “potential”. He asks her to pretend to be his “dead” wife, so they can claim and split the fortune that was left to her after her entire family was killed by Nazis.

Blinded by her need to be near Johnny she accepts and allows him to transform her back into a lady fit to claim an estate. Shot as if under the Viennese shadows of Carol Reed’s The Third Man, Petzold’s film often seems too on the nose when it comes to symbolism; for instance Johnny works at a club in the American district of Berlin called “Phoenix” which undoubtedly represents Nelly’s own return from the flames (a notion even more perverse when we think about the fact that she indeed escaped the ovens and gases of concentration camps) and several characters often remark about the idea of “performance” near Nelly, at one point Johnny is instructing her on how to dye her hair by showing her a picture in a magazine, but he clarifies that the woman in the photograph is not his wife, but an actress. Oh how little does he know about her ability to perform.

What’s brilliant about moments in which Petzold shines such a bright spotlight on the “obviousness” of his plot, is that he immediately removes that burden from the audience’s mind, instead forcing us to dig deeper to try and see what’s really underneath the skin of these people, to see beyond the performances everyone is putting on. For instance is Johnny truly the romantic hero of Nelly’s fantasies, or is he in fact the man that turned her in to the Nazis and sealed her fate? What about Nelly’s friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) who not only rescues her, but also seems to be deeply in love with her? How did she survive under the extremely homophobic Nazi regime?

But since the film centers mostly on Nelly, it’s only fair that she seems to be the key to unlocking its mysteries, and what an enigma she is as played by the magnificent Hoss. Her Russian doll of a performance is made even more fascinating when we consider that Nelly was a former chanteuse, who in her past life best expressed her feelings through song. This is where the film ties back to My Fair Lady, as Petzold too uses music to let us into the real feelings people can't express "openly". Scenes in the nightclub feature songs about "shadows", obsession and living in darkness, and in one heartbreaking scene, a torn down Nelly asks her friend Lene to play a record that touched her, it's one of the few times we see her smile in the film. My Fair Lady through the years has gained a reputation for being nothing but a fluff, misogynistic musical, when the truth is, that just like Phoenix, it’s a film that wears its heart on the same sleeve under which it’s hiding its ace. Like Eliza Doolittle, Nelly is much more than a woman driven by love, even though this is precisely what she wants us to believe. We come to understand at the end of Phoenix that Nelly’s greatest love might not be Johnny (just as Eliza's wasn't Professor Higgins) but her desperate need to survive by any means possible. Perhaps even this love that she believes so much in, is nothing but a self imposed act which she has been forced to put on due to the circumstances in which she’s always lived, first as a woman, then as a wife, and later as a concentration camp survivor. The necessity of performance is the only thing that seems true to Nelly at the end of Phoenix, for even love might be nothing but a myth.

Phoenix opens today at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas. For tickets and more click here.