Spoiler alert: I have a new favourite Christian Petzold film. Afire is new in tone but still signature Petzold, melding inspired writing, assured direction, dedicated acting, poetic camerawork and a fresh playfulness and
joie de vivre. Petzold’s fifth Berlinale Competition invitation and the second drama in his elemental trilogy alongside the more melodramatic water myth Undine, Afire combines water and fire and brings back Paula Beer, who had won the Silver Bear for Best Actress as Undine.
Afire is young and joyous, laugh-out-loud funny and touching, light and melancholic, and I wanted to see it again the moment I walked out out the cinema. Petzold has told the film’s origin story before, how a Covid infection during Cannes 2020 sent him into fever dreams of love, lust and fire that he set out to manifest in his latest drama, putting other projects aside.
Four young people, Leon, Felix, Devid and Nadja, meet in a summer home by the sea when the parched forest around them catches fire, as do their emotions: desire meets love, jealousies turn into resentments. The Baltic setting (see Petzold's film Barbara) gives Petzold DoP Hans Fromm ample opportunity to paint a languid and sensual summer backdrop of an undulating seascape, swaying evergreen forests and fiery skies (the German film title literally translates as Red Sky).
Beer again portrays a fairy-like but tenacious academic, gigging as an ice-cream seller and having loud sex with rough-around-the-edges local lifeguard hunk Devid. Actor Enno Trebs (The White Ribbon; No One’s With the Calves) also returns from Undine, effortlessly oscillating between disarming approachability, instinctive sex appeal and adorable infatuation.
Enter aspiring photography student Felix, a sweetly happy-go-lucky and practical Langston Uibel, reminding me of some of the skills he showed in How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast). Felix is working on a portfolio with portraits of people watching the sea, while his anxious and cranky buddy Leon is trying to finish his second book.
Thomas Schubert (Axiom) is a revelation in the lead role of Leon. Petzold nails the character's agonizing in the Berlinale press conference: “He doesn't have problems, he makes problems for himself.” In the same breath, the director joked that he can relate to Leon’s labouring: The young man, struggling with his sophomore manuscript called Club Sandwich (yes, it is that bad), harks back to Petzold and his early film Cuba Libre: “I played the director, but I wasn’t one.” Petzold lures us into ignoring the ominous signs of imminent environmental disaster as he keeps us busy empathizing with the foursome as they circle each other. Watching Leon mess up, realize it, mess up again and barely able to turn his behaviour around before external disaster supersedes the friends’ internal turmoil is especially engrossing.
The film is ideally cast by the recently deceased Petzold regular casting director Simone Bär, who also cast for Spielberg and Tarantino. Trebs and Uibel, who become fated lovers, played together in Sanctuary; Beer and Trebs met as child actors in The Poll Diaries; and Schubert and Beer portrayed a young married couple in The Dark Valley. Matthias Brandt, who enters late but crucially as Leon’s mentor/father figure, editor and publisher you might remember as the bar owner/narrator from Transit.
Petzold as ever soaks up his environs and pours them into his cinematic universe as palpable influences, from film history to classic literature to pop music. The ending references Rossellini’s
Viaggio in Italia, when Paula Beer quite literally reenacts a tearful Ingrid Bergman scene from the neorealism-goes-nouvelle vague film. Earlier, Petzold has her recite the poem The Asra by Heinrich Heine (Petzold, on fire and flu drugs in the presser: “the Bob Dylan of the 19th century"), ending with the famous lines “and my tribe, it is the Asra, who die when they love.” At the time we do not understand it as the prophecy it will become.
The soundtrack consists of all of three songs, including one from Berlin’s Tarwater and one from Vienna’s Wallners, the recurring theme song "In My Mind." Petzold had heard it on the car radio, found it fitting and liked the band. The lyrics resonate just like the poetry:
We're gonna live free and live wild / We’ll be living in a life just right / Love’s gonna make us, gonna make us find / In my mind. Leon wants to live in a life just right — while life passes him by and the others just live. Petzold already won the Silver Bear for the direction of Barbara but easily deserves it again for his congenial
carpe diem tale Afire.
by
Jutta Brendemuhl
image: Jutta Brendemuhl
