The Berlin School’s prized filmmaker director and writer Christian Petzold’s new film, Afire, releases this weekend at the Coolidge Corner Theater. The German summer romance is bound to be one of the year’s most literary films, a claim that shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the director’s education, but it’s also one of the year’s most romantic films.
Two friends, Leon (Thomas Schubert) the writer and Felix (Langston Uibel) the photographer, vacation at a holiday home owned by Felix’s family on the Baltic Sea over the summer to finish a book manuscript and portfolio, respectively. When they arrive, an elusive and alluring woman, Nadja (Paula Beer) is already there, leaving traces of her presence but having a life too interesting to actually loaf around the house. Sharing a room, Leon and Felix hear Nadja having some pretty great sex back-to-back nights through the paper-thin walls before they actually encounter her in the flesh. When Leon finally glimpses her, there’s something captivating about the confident way she carries herself. Her galvanizing wardrobe helps on this point; she always wears stronger colors than the men around her whose dark styles blend together into normality in the face of her singularity.
A forest fire rages on the local news in the meanwhile. Leon ignores the danger and the more optimistic Felix assumes, like only a character in a book can, that we will be safe, or perhaps, the worst will never happen to us. Felix and Devid (Enno Trebs), Nadja’s sex partner from the night before, hit it off until they become sex partners themselves. But like the great threesome description in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), all intimate activity is completely auditory. With just a single on-screen kiss, a passionless one delivered only as the punchline to a joke, the mix of heterosexual and same-sex relationships between the four characters consummate in a sensuality only possible through the passionate delivery of our species’ single most defining characteristic: the ability to poetically use words. This voyeuristic denial makes the intimacy more innocent—and sexier—though the former is more important to where the film will end up, as the fire positions its violence to eternally absciss the four friends.
From an Uwe Johnson aside to Leon’s shitty manuscript satirically titled “Club Sandwich,” the world of the film can’t be split from its literary mold. The characters function on some theatrical plane of Romanticized mythology, completely unaware of what “the narrator” is really up to with the impending forest fire. Most beautifully, in one scene, Nadja recites Heinrich Heine’s “The Asra,” a poem that concludes with a note of doomed lovers, to the new group of friends:
And the slave said, ‘I am called
Mahomet, I am from Yemen,
and my tribe, it is the Asra,
who die, when they love.
She finishes and the budding pair of Felix and Devid ask her to recite again, coming just shy of telegraphing their shared fate. Or… perhaps, someone else is interpreting this moment from a later point in time, as the narration of Leon’s editor Helmut (Matthias Brandt) at the end of the film suggests. In fact, it would seem—with the poignant foreshadowing, frequent allusions to other works, fanciful symbols like fire & water, and, of course, the overarching testament to the power of words—the whole of the film is in actuality Leon’s real masterpiece (it’s certainly not “Club Sandwich”), a romance in the tradition of Pompeii about lovers doomed to the fire by the Baltic.
I’m not reading too much into this either. Petzold himself has said as much. “Cinema itself must tremble. The content changes the form, the form changes the content. I am a literary scholar by training, and there are people who make distinctions between directors who are painters, who are musicians, and then those who are writers,” the director told Mubi. “But in actuality, cinema needs literature.”
Afire, in its soft aesthetic summer before predestined devastation, reminds me of one of my favorite films of this century, Danis Tanović’s Cirkus Columbia (2010). Petzold lamented to Isaac Feldberg of RogerEbert.com of Germany’s lost right to the “summer film” with the rise of the Third Reich. Columbia is also a summer film, set in the summer just before the Yugoslav Wars, featuring, like Afire, the reordering of multiple romances just before the new relationships must confront the gist of history. Tanović, who is Bosnian, makes films—not totally unlike the creators of the Berlin School—where the political and the aesthetical are difficult to detangle. I think Petzold is up to something similar here.
“This is simply ordinary and it should be like that in the film,” the auteur shared with Mubi about the climate devastation that looms over his tenth feature. Like the famed image of the Pompeii lovers that the film references, terrible things are often ordinary and simultaneously beautiful in their destruction. If cinema must tremble, as Petzold claims, his latest film does so by depicting what such an artistic challenge does to the soul of an artist: it breaks their medium.
Afire
2023
dir. Christian Petzold
102 min.
Now playing @ Coolidge Corner Theatre
