Afire

With each new film, Christian Petzold increases his stature as the foremost 21st century German director. His latest is called Afire. It’s a different kind of work for him, in that here Petzold turns a critical eye on the figure of the lonely artist, the kind of person employing the symbolism and emotional dramaturgy that Petzold himself has displayed in some of his previous films.

Two young men: Felix, a photographer, played by Langston Uibel and Leon, a writer (Thomas Schubert), go to stay at a house near the shore of the Baltic Sea, owned by Felix’s mother. The car breaks down on the way, which gets everything off to a bad start. When they arrive, they’re surprised to find Nadja, a young woman played by Paula Beer, renting a room there. Leon has trouble sleeping because he can hear Nadja in the next room apparently having sex. Going outside to sleep, he sees a man leaving the house in the morning. It’s a fourth character, Devid, who works as a lifeguard at the beach nearby. When Felix and Leon meet Nadja that day, she turns out to be very confident and friendly, full of humor and good spirits, and beautiful as well. Leon seems both attracted to and repelled by her.

It took a little while for me to realize that the film has a main character, the “point of view” character as they say, and it’s the person that in most stories like this would be a supporting role—it’s Leon, the depressed writer. Leon wants to finish his second novel on this trip, but everything that has happened so far annoys or upsets him. He’s a lumpish disagreeable kind of guy, who seems challenged or nonplussed by the behavior of Nadja, Felix, and Devid. Petzold pulls off an interesting narrative trick here. All the intrigue one might expect from the set up, three men and a woman in a summer cottage, is completely muted, in effect only existing in the mind of the self-involved, suspicious Leon.

This “point of view” colors and distorts everything the audience sees—it is Leon who rejects everything offered, and all we can really see are his weird introverted reactions. When they go swimming, for example, he says he can’t go with them because he needs to work. But left alone at his typewriter, he mostly just fusses, paces around, and stares into space. Nadja seems to have his number. She can sometimes be brutally honest, but in truth she’s open to being friends. For him, though, everything is taken personally. The arrival of a fifth character, Leon’s editor Helmut, to go over the manuscript with him, adds another element of tension. When he senses that Helmut doesn’t like the writing, Leon goes into full defensive mode. It is a superb performance by Schubert as Leon, accessing a place of deep emotional insecurity.

Afire is a good poetic choice for a title. The German title literally translates as “Red Sky.” In the evenings, the characters observe a wildfire in a nearby forest that turns the sky red. The summer wildfires have become frequent in Europe as they have around the world. The  real question in this film is how the artist should respond. Leon is too busy being the center of the world to recognize and truly appreciate the human beings sharing the space with him. Afire is about personal barriers coming down in spite of all denial, when we’re forced in the end to see past ourselves.