“Something’s not right” are the first words uttered in Christian Petzold’s Afire, coming mere moments after the title card has dissolved into a shot from inside a Mercedes sedan cruising on an empty forest road. They’re spoken by the driver, Felix (Langston Uibel), who’s heard something misfiring in his car’s engine. “I don’t hear anything,” replies his friend Leon (Thomas Schubert), who seems to be barely conscious in the passenger seat. One smash cut later and the duo is hoofing it the rest of the way to Felix’s mom’s vacation home, luggage slung over their backs, via a dubious shortcut through the woods.
Doubt emanates from Leon’s every pore. Not only was he wrong about the car’s engine, he resists the only feasible solution to the problem of reaching the house—lugging their bags the rest of the way—since there’s no mobile signal in this corner of the German Baltic coast. This pattern—a situation changes and Leon is unwilling or unable to adjust—repeats itself across Afire, an often comic but serious-minded study of a creative mind stuck in self-centered neutral. Neither the forest fires in the distance nor budding love shake Leon out of his doldrums as he tries to finish his second novel, and struggles with his knowledge that it’s no good.
Like much of Petzold’s work, Afire captures complex human interactions in a style of clear-minded sobriety. It’s built up out of clean angles and precise, unobtrusive cuts that emphasize performance and visual narration over melodramatic spectacle, which only means that when visionary moments are sprung on the viewer, they’re all the more powerful.
Petzold and his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Hans Fromm, mostly allow the bright light of coastal summer days to speak for itself, the radiance of the forest’s greens—and Leon’s comparatively happy compatriots—contrasting starkly with our main character’s perpetually dark mood. And for his part, Schubert imbues Leon’s grumpiness with impressive dimension, making his abrasiveness funny without turning the character into a mere punchline.
When Felix and Leon get to their isolated house in the woods, they find that there’s actually another occupant that Felix’s mother forgot to warn them about: Nadja, played by a particularly effervescent Paula Beer. Where Felix quickly acclimates to the news, Leon reacts with all the grace of a four-year-old who’s been asked to share a toy. Their unexpected roommate, in contrast to Leon, goes with the flow, and eventually proves happy to bring the boys into the fold.
Nadja is working at an ice cream stand run by a local hotel and enjoying her summer, as evidenced in part by the casual fling she’s having with Devid (Enno Trebs). The sound of their nighttime romps particularly rankle Leon, who claims that the noise of Nadja and Devid having sex robs him of the sleep that he needs to get his writing done the next day, though he seems to spend all of his time bouncing tennis balls off the wall and rifling through the house, while the others are off enjoying the sunny weather. “The work won’t allow it” is the phrase he prefers when stiffly declining every invitation to go out, words that Nadja teasingly throws back at him. She seems relatively unfazed by Leon’s stand-offishness, pushing back when he gets too nasty but always defaulting to the open smile of a person who, unlike Leon, is secure in herself.
Leon, who doesn’t clock that Felix and Devid have begun their own affair, and who often speaks without any thought to how his words impact others, has shut himself into a kind of private oblivion. His lack of awareness begins as a source of humor in Petzold’s sharp script, but as the film slowly and slyly builds tension, it threatens to have more serious consequences. Leon’s obliviousness is reflected in the larger group’s dismissal of the encroaching forest fires, a distant spectacle that gives the film its German title (Roter Himmel, or Red Sky), and which, in one of the film’s most memorable images, Nadja calls Leon onto the roof to observe.
This is Beer’s third collaboration with Petzold, and her second co-starring turn in a planned trilogy of films about elements, creativity, and love. In 2020’s Undine, she played a professional young woman who may or may not be the modern incarnation of the mythical murderous mermaid with whom she and the film share a name. Here, she’s associated with the sea again, her ice cream stand placed right on the beach, which is just one example of Petzold using the proximity of the ocean here to playfully refer back to the theme of his last film.
Nadja is hardly a mythical figure like Undine, but the way she first walks into frame clad in a sundress that burns red like the nighttime sky we later see in the film invites speculation as to the connection Petzold might be drawing between the elements and his apparent muse. But if it’s worth pondering the politics of this association of woman and semi-mystic elementality, there’s also little doubt that Nadja is more than some seductive dryad who’s emerged from the forest to rid Leon of his woes. One might argue that the whole point of the film is that Nadja, and the rest of the people around Leon, has much more going on than he cares to process.
The blinders through which Leon sees the world keep him from noticing that he’s living a more interesting story than the one he’s written. For her part, Nadja turns out to be an authority on the subject of stories. Her recitation from memory of Heinrich Heine’s poem “Asra” over dinner with Leon and his publisher, Helmut (Matthias Brandt), provides the film with an enrapturing, elliptical centerpiece. Heine’s poem is a Romantic ode to love as suffering, but can the same be said about Afire? As usual, Petzold is more interested in opening than in closing thematic loops. Fire connotes many things: light, creativity, love, inner suffering, a dying planet, malfunctioning cars. Out of these elements, Afire builds a story that begins as a hangout comedy with a sad-sack at its center but gradually becomes a slow-motion conflagration that offers no easy answers.
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Incredible choice of words. A great film with the greatness of a good review.