Afire Review: A Twisty, Postmodern Fairy Tale Nested Inside A Sexy Summer Romp
Over three decades since the critic Rüdiger Suchsland first identified an upstart group of graduates of the German film school Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie Berlin (dffb) as "The Berlin School," the most exciting new wave of German filmmakers since the days of Fassbinder, Schlöndorff, and Wenders are still producing some of the most vital and interesting work on the world stage.
Christian Petzold and Angela Schanelec have always been the two prodigious halves of the heart of the Berlin School, even as that taxonomy has expanded to include younger filmmakers, those who didn't study at dffb, those who work outside of Germany, and even those who reject it as a label. Luminaries from this second generation include Maren Ade, Fatih Akin, Christopher Hochhäusler, and Maria Speth.
The godfather and godmother of this loose movement both released acclaimed films this year. Schanalec's "Music" in particular has become a critics' darling, snagging the coveted Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlinale. Petzold's "Afire" may seem minor in comparison, a playful genre exercise that doesn't hold a candle to the run of intellectually rigorous, overtly political films from the past decade which made him an international star.
But watch more closely. Watch it again. Notice the off-kilter mirroring of the opening and conclusion, the uncanny charge to all the characters except for the lead, the circular nature of the dialogue, the way it folds in on itself, creating an ever-so-slight disconnect from the action. In "Afire," Petzold has crafted something subtle but infinitely complex. The film entrances, deceives, shimmers, and shape-shifts before your eyes, but like a column of flame, if you get close enough, you can feel with your own hands its burning intensity.
Into the woods
"Afire" is a summer movie. A bad vacation movie in the vein of Catherine Breillat's "Fat Girl" or Ingmar Bergman's "Summer With Monika." The rugged travails of the winter and the slurry of the spring have all melted away, and your dreams of therapeutic relaxation and easy sensuality got you through it. But small displeasures begin to bloom across the surface of your perfect idyll, like a rancid skin on fresh milk.
One of Petzold's many clever twists on this familiar story is to send in his protagonist determined from the start to be miserable. Leon (Thomas Schubert) is a writer working on his second novel. His best friend Felix (Langston Uibel), a budding photographer, has a family house in the forest near Ahrenshoop, a grassy and serene vacationer's hamlet along the Baltic coast in Northern Germany. "I need to work on my manuscript, and you need to work on your portfolio" is Leon's constant refrain. The phrase that, like a charm, breaks any spell of fun or frivolity the other characters try and cast on Leon throughout the film. With his self-serious comportment and all-black wardrobe, Leon wants it to be clear that he means business, and only business.
The film opens with an ominous portent of things to come: Felix's car breaks down on the way to the house, and they must walk the remaining 5+ miles to get there. Taking a page from the Grimm fairytales that dance around the German imagination, the men venture into the woods and immediately get lost. Leon hears a low-flying plane barrel overhead and unsettling animal cries in the distance. They eventually find the house, but they find it too late. An unshakeable feeling has entered the film, an uncanny sense that things aren't what they seem now subtly pervades.
A divided man
In classic bad vacation and also classic fairy tale fashion, when they arrive at the house, they see clear signs that someone else is already there. Laundry spins in the machine and dirty plates litter the kitchen. It turns out to be Nadja (Paula Beer, Petzold's newest muse after a years-long collaboration with Nina Hoss came to an end), the niece of a friend of Felix's mother. Leon reacts to the discovery with frustration. He and Felix will have to share a room — the smaller one — and his precious peace and quiet now face a new, unknown threat. Felix is simply excited to meet her.
Thus the line between Leon and everyone else is drawn, a line that will continue to act as a boundary past which all things that make life worth living (and eventually keep you alive) lie. A line that Leon has no confidence in his own abilities to across.
Like Felix, Nadja has an easy relationship with easiness. She has loud sex with local lifeguard Devid (Enno Trebs) at night and during the day reads, cooks, rides around on her bike, and works at an ice cream stand on the seashore. Leon has so yoked his sense of self-worth to his work that he's become completely disambiguated from life's most meaningful pleasures: sex, food, and frolicking. Felix, Nadja, and Devid indulge in these activities without hesitation. Because Leon cannot understand how, he envies them. Because he'd very much like to do the same, but can't admit that to himself, he resents them.
Leon suffers embarrassing faux pas after mishap after indignity in his quest to maintain a sense of productivity and importance, alienating everyone else along the way. But this dark fairy tale has a moral lesson in store for him to learn.
In flames
The fire and the red sky of the film's titles derive from a small brushfire that erupts in the westerly woods at the film's beginning. By its end, the sky glows a forbidding shade of crimson as the flames threaten to engulf the entire forest. The tensions boiling between the characters — Leon develops a crush on Nadja; Nadja reads and hates Leon's manuscript, which is hilariously titled "Club Sandwich"; Devid hops from Nadja's bed to Felix's; Leon insults both Nadja and Devid's on perceived class terms in a thwarted attempt to soothe his own insecurities — spill over and enflame the very real danger of incineration.
Like many fairy tales, "Afire" ends with a tragic death designed to teach the hero a lesson. But when the film pulls back to reveal that Leon has written an entirely new manuscript based on the events of the film (after receiving terrible feedback from his editor on "Club Sandwich," mind you), one begins to question what all that uncanniness might have been for. Maybe "Afire" isn't such a simple fairy tale. Or if it is, maybe it isn't Petzold who wrote it.
Are we out of the woods?
"Afire" begins with Leon tripping bewildered into the forest, and it ends with him hurdling alone and on foot out of it. In virtually every scene Leon is in his hubris is exposed, he's mocked and degraded for his sad-sack cynicism, or is confronted head-on with aspects of his personality that should change. Even when other characters have private moments, Leon either overhears them or catches wind of what happened. And what happened always has some consequential effect on him, as if the others live their lives in service of his self-improvement.
If you watch "Afire" passively, allowing your mind to auto-fill the gaps that Petzold leaves open yet simmering, you may see a story in which a wrong-headed yet good-hearted young man transforms after tragedy shakes him out of his solipsistic stupor. If you watch closely, attenuated to Petzold's penchant for irony and pastiche, "Afire" looks more like a closed loop than a line of progress. A snake eating its own tail, even.
The genius of "Afire" is that it can be viewed these two ways: Leon can have learned something valuable through trial and tragedy and emerged not only a better man, but with the Great German Novel in hand to prove it. You can also view him as so inwardly bound, so incapable of change and morally bankrupt that even the most intense imaginable loss is viewed as mere material for his ongoing slog up the career ladder, and away from his own body and emotions. It's a classical fable or a postmodern story within a story. Triumphant or deeply nihilistic — or both. The second in his planned "elements" trilogy, "Afire" will be difficult to top.
"Afire" is currently showing in theaters.
/Film Rating: 8 out of 10