Afire

Roter Himmel

The Match Factory

VERDICT: Christian Petzold is in top form with this intimate summer drama that quietly builds to an unexpected, heart-wrenching finale.

“Generosity” isn’t a word one usually thinks of using about Christian Petzold’s films. His characters are always complex yet often too pent up to generate warm feelings on top of our sympathy. Afire is an exception, a supremely generous film that accords even its main character, a sullen young writer stymied by his constitutional inability to see rather than merely observe, a perhaps undeserved measure of grace. The director’s latest marks a welcome return to a more contained, intimate story in which the world’s catastrophes, here represented by devastating forest fires, lick around the edges, creating an atmosphere of approaching danger threatening to interrupt four young people in a summer home by the sea. Afire doesn’t play with narrative forms and its references are the here-and-now; it surprises in ways that feel right each time, and it quietly builds to a thoroughly unexpected, heart-wrenching finale. After several strong yet not wholly convincing films, Petzold delivers a work likely to make art house box offices glow.

His most recent muse Paula Beer is the film’s emotional core and he clearly adores how her every glance seems suffused with intelligent kindness. She’s not seen right away, and in fact her first appearance on screen is fleeting and at a distance, but the red of the simple summer dress she invariably wears becomes a welcome eye-catcher each time the color is glimpsed. In some ways that’s ironic given how Afire is about the opposite of external appearances, demanding a more generous (that word again) assessment of each character as it reminds us that initial impressions are reductionist at best.

Which doesn’t mean they’re always wrong. Felix (Langston Uibel) is driving with his friend Leon (Thomas Schubert, Wintermärchen) to his family’s summer house by the sea when the car breaks down in the forest. Felix sets off on foot to ensure his bearings are correct, leaving a tense and jumpy Leon to wait as the light begins to fade. When Felix returns, he mischievously startles Leon, whose anger bursts open in a playfight that uneasily straddles the line between good-natured teasing and genuine violence, with a touch of sexual tension.

On arrival they learn that Felix’s mom had forgotten to tell him that a colleague’s niece is already staying for the summer, so the two guys have to share a bedroom. Leon’s deeply unhappy with the situation: they’ve come not for a holiday, but for Felix to make a portfolio for art school and Leon to put the finishing touches to his novel. His idea is to hunker down in quiet, but instead Felix keeps proposing they go to the beach. Why these two are friends is one of the film’s nagging unresolved questions: Felix is outgoing and spur-of-the-moment, whereas Leon is dismissive and always on edge, hiding from the world behind his need to work. In truth he doesn’t do much writing and wastes a great deal of time while pretending to have filled it with constant labor, when largely he just observes what’s around him from the vantage point of a spectator, not a participant.

Before Felix and Leon meet Nadja (Beer), the woman in the house, they hear her having sex at night, which naturally further infuriates the exasperated Leon. She’s having a fling with the local rescue swimmer Devid (Eno Trebs, Undine), and quickly all but Leon fall into an easy-going summer vibe. Part of the problem is that Leon knows his publisher Helmut Werner (Matthias Brandt) doesn’t like the new manuscript, but his relationship with the world is already compromised. While slim Felix and toned Devid easily walk around in swim shorts, heavy-set Leon remains fully dressed, even at the beach. His engagement with those around him is predicated on the idea that no one will like him, so he misreads signals and labels everyone: Nadja works selling ice cream at the beach, leading him to assume that’s the sum of who she is, when she’s actually doing a PhD on Heinrich Heine (specifically the poem “The Asra,” whose imagery of a love-sick slave gazing upon a beautiful princess is, of course, apposite).

It’s hard to fully buy Leon as a potentially great writer since he’s so incapable of assessing what he observes or sensing what others feel. He’s stubbornly difficult to like, and Petzold does little to try to change that, allowing him to remain true to character. And yet the hint of an unexpected tattoo peaking just beyond his open-neck shirt makes us wonder whether there is indeed something else here besides an uptight author incapable of accepting that his manuscript is crap (and it is. Seriously crap). Meanwhile the other characters flourish under our gaze, completely winning us over in their openness to the world and each other, not to mention their comfort within themselves.

As always, Petzold conceives his stories on multiple levels, so the approaching forest fire is real yet also takes on a metaphorical sense of encroaching doom – something in nature, in society, is off, and it will destroy us. Does Afire suggest that something can ultimately grow from the ashes? That’s open to interpretation; perhaps all that can be said is hope is there.

While Beer is the film’s warm, protective heart, Langston Uibel’s joyful, uncomplicated ease makes Felix the kind of guy you just want to be around. Both he and Thomas Schubert play their roles as a mix of boys and men, Uibel capturing the energy and freedom of youth while Schubert is the embodiment of childish petulance, yet they’re both in their mid-20s. Eno Trebs is the right fit in all this, clocked at the start as just a sexy swimmer but then becoming a more integral member of the group, in surprising ways.

With Afire it feels as if Petzold has shed the label “cold,” and not just with the characters. Hans Fromm’s camera captures the northern sun and its persistent light without any harshness, even allowing the red glow of the forest fire to have a disturbing beauty. The film opens with the Wallners song “In My Mind,” whose words and melody remain in the head and make a welcome comeback towards the end.

 

Director: Christian Petzold
Screenplay: Christian Petzold
Cast: Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel, Eno Trebs, Matthias Brandt
Producers: Florian Koerner von Gustorf, Michael Weber, Anton Kaiser
Cinematography: Hans Fromm
Production designer: K.D. Gruber
Costume designer: Katharina Ost
Editing: Bettina Böhler
Sound: Andreas Mücke-Niesytka
Production companies: Schramm Film Koerner, Weber Kaiser, ZDF, Arte
World sales: The Match Factory
Venue: Berlinale (competition)
In German
102 minutes