There are a handful of directors whose films I always try to watch as soon as they are available. Christian Petzold is one of these and I headed off to see Afire in the new second screen installed in the basement of the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds. This second screen is designed to allow the cinema to play more films and to keep films available for longer. A Bank Holiday afternoon screening with carnival happening a few streets away is not the best indicator of how well the screen will do and there were less than ten of us in a 50 seat cinema. But I wouldn’t have been anywhere else.
Afire is an odd title as we only use the word very occasionally in English to mean ‘on fire’. The literal German translation has been taken to be ‘Red Skies’ but I’m more persuaded to think of it as ‘Red Heaven’ which I think is also correct. It refers directly to the threat of forest fires in the German summer, but I think there is also the suggestion of a dangerous sexuality or desire. The film is set in a house close to the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern the sparsely populated state formed after German re-unification with Rostock as the biggest city. Two friends, Felix (Langston Uibel) and Leon (Thomas Schubert), have been given the chance to stay in the house during the summer months – it belongs to Felix’s mother. When they get there they discover that it is already occupied by a young woman, Nadja (Paula Beer), the niece of one of Felix’s mother’s workmates. There is a warning for the young men in the sense that their car breaks down on the country road and they have to walk to the house. For the first couple of nights, Leon is kept awake by what appears to be the vigorous sexual encounter between Nadja and a young man, Devid (Enno Trebs), who turns out to be the lifeguard (or ‘rescue swimmer’) on the nearby beach. But things aren’t quite what they seem and I won’t spoil what happens except to explain that Leon is trying to finish his second novel and Langston has a rather more laid-back approach to formulating a portfolio for his art school project. There is only one other central character, Leon’s publisher Helmut (Matthias Brandt) who has promised to visit Leon and discuss his novel over a weekend. This visit turns out to be pivotal in many ways, bringing together many of the intriguing narrative threads.
Petzold tells us in a series of interviews that Germany doesn’t have a great tradition of ‘Summer films’, unlike France or the US. I’m not sure he is right about that since I can think of two films by his fellow ‘Berlin School’ colleagues that might qualify, Thomas Arslan’s Ferien (Vacation, Germany 2007) and Angela Schanelec’s Nachmittag (Afternoon, Germany 2007). I would also add the summer films in Italian cinema, including those made by British directors such as Joanna Hogg’s Unrelated (UK 2007) as well as films like Bertolucci’s Luna (Italy-US 1979) and Stealing Beauty (1996). But, of course, Petzold is generally correct about French and American cinema. The whole point is that such films are character studies which can erupt into different kinds of dramatic narratives. I also thought of Asgar Farhadi’s About Elly (Iran 2009) as a similar kind of film.
The issue in Afire is that Leon is a bit of an arsehole, obsessed with his own second novel at the expense of everything else. Afire has also been described as a comedy and I did indeed laugh out loud on a couple of occasions. It could be described as a ‘comedy of manners’. The main comedic impetus is the pricking of Leon’s pomposity and his earnestness. That said, Thomas Schubert gives an excellent performance as Leon. All the performances by the five main characters are good and especially that of Paula Beer who radiates charm and eroticism throughout (without ever flaunting it) and eventually reveals the depth of her character. When Christian Petzold lost Nina Hoss as his principal actor I was devastated but Paula Beer has proved to be just as good and I’ve seen hints that the two might appear together in a future Petzold film. Yes please!
Petzold has fun with some literary asides, alongside the sun, sea and culinary pleasures of the holiday season. He’s partly inspired by the summer comedies of Eric Rohmer. It turns out that the French distributor of this film is Les Films du Losange, the company founded by Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder in 1962 and Petzold mentions La Collectioneuse (France 1967) as a particular inspiration. There is also an intellectual dimension to the film partly aimed at Leon. Petzold refers to the local small resort where there is now a growing tourist industry promoting the local celebrity literary figure Uwe Johnson (1932-84) where tourists mispronounce his name as if he was an ex-American President. This is gentle satire about the history East Germany, the subject of more detailed and serious analysis in Petzold’s earlier films such as Yella (2007) and Barbara (2012). The latter film includes sequences of Nina Hoss cycling by the beach, matched in Afire by Paula Beer cycling by the beach. But where questions about re-unification and memories of the East informed earlier films, Petzold is now in what some have referred to as his ‘elements trilogy’ with Afire following the watery fantasy drama of Undine (2020). The warning about forest fires occurs several times during Afire and at one pint there is a magical but also fearful warning as ash flakes fall gently in the garden of the house. I’m not going to spoil the narrative resolution of Afire, but I will say that some expectations are met in dramatic and tragic fashion while other outcomes are less clear but perhaps more hopeful.
One of the leading British reviewers gave this film 2 out of 5 stars. Fortunately, that was a minority view and Petzold won the Silver Bear at Berlin again in 2023. I don’t award stars but I will say that this is already one of my films of the year. Do see it if you get the chance. As well as the performances, the cinematography by Hans Fromm and the editing by Bettina Böhler, two long-time Petzold collaborators, are also very good, as is the music, including the song ‘In My Mind’ by Austrian band the Wallners. Here’s the trailer from distributor Curzon in the UK:
itp Global Film 