Midsummer night's dream-film: "Miroirs No. 3"

Our beleaguered arthouse distributors are having a firesale on festival favourites before this year's Cannes gets under way: everything must go on release. As of tomorrow, the new François Ozon will find its screens under threat from a new Christian Petzold, the German writer-director whose naggingly academic dramas have, in the past, left this viewer markedly more quizzical than many of my colleagues. (I'm not looking to write a thesis; I'm really just here for a good time.) Miroirs No. 3 is a miniature - an 86-minute four-hander - but also a throwback to the ambiguous artfilms of yore; like some cross between Three Colours Blue and Philip Haas's underrated movie adaptation of Paul Auster's The Music of Chance, it pivots on a car crash before making vague movements in the direction of a study of happenstance. The crash, on the backroads of the German countryside, robs pianist Laura (recent Petzold favourite Paula Beer) of her boyfriend, but throws Laura herself clear into the home and life of Betty (Barbara Auer), an older woman who was first on the scene. Betty, who initially appears hung up on painting the fence surrounding her roadside property, refers to Laura as Yelena, and wistfully recounts the story of Tom Sawyer to her bedbound charge as a means of getting her unexpected new housemate to pick up a paintbrush of her own. It feels like the kind of bedtime story a parent might well tell her child, much as the film around this scene gradually shapes up as a Petzoldian reverie, shifting away from the taut psychological realism of this director's early, breakthrough films in favour of something altogether more dreamlike.

The signs are there from the off. Miroirs' early scenes are somehow too bright, too sunny, too placidly quiet to belong to the real world. If we're being rational about it, it makes no sense for Laura to move in with a stranger like Betty, save that this is exactly the sort of spiritual connection the women have in, say, certain Bergman movies; it also makes no sense that Betty's rough-edged husband and son (Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs), mechanics who make their living tampering with the GPSes on sportscars, should have left Betty rattling around on pills in a remote country property, except that's what bluffly unthinking men do in arthouse movies. (Well, that and ply the women who pass through their lives with beer. I can't rule out the possibility Petzold is floating a free-associative pun on his lead actress's surname in such moments: it's that kind of film.) The scene strategy is generally perverse, as it would be in any dream. No character is ever quite where they ought to be, which occasions a lot of huffing and puffing around between Betty's home and the garage where the men work; whether bikes, dishwashers or cars, things keep breaking down or falling apart; and Petzold positions Beer upfront as a postergirl for preoccupation. (Setting us, in turn, to wonder whether this is a limbo of Laura's own making, or one which exists solely inside her own imagination; on the soundtrack, Frankie Valli belts out the night begins to turn your head around.) Miroirs does enough, in this way, to invite spectator speculation: this, you feel, is one reason we critics have collectively had such a soft spot for everything Petzold. (He often needs explaining.) It's also that flight of fancy a filmmaker only gets to make once the moneymen have learnt to trust in them totally. As a narrative, the film feels loose, rattly, as if it too could fall apart at any moment; this script's screws forever seem in need of tightening. But it does conjure up an idea of leisure, of being far from home with no particular plans: it wouldn't surprise me to learn Petzold made it because the money and actors were available, the weather was good, and he had a gap in his schedule. Minor, but intriguing.

Miroirs No. 3 opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.