Somewhere on the Baltic coast of northern Germany, two friends – a photographer working on a portfolio, a writer fretfully wrangling a near-finished draft of his second novel – arrive at a summer house to find a young woman, the sunny, free-spirited Nadja (Paula Beer), already staying there. Caught up in the flighty, Rohmer-esque spirit of the vacation, the photographer, Felix (Langston Uibel), places his artistic endeavours on the back burner and allows himself to be seduced by the endless possibilities of the summer. Writer Leon, however, hunkers down with a pack of cigarettes and a mounting sense of injustice and prepares to have a thoroughly miserable time of it.
With his lofty pretensions and his rapacious need for affirmation, Leon (a superb Thomas Schubert), is one of the most overtly comic characters created to date by the German writer-director Christian Petzold. And on the face of it, Afire (winner of the Silver Bear grand jury prize at this year’s Berlin film festival) seems to operate in a lighter, breezier register than much of Petzold’s previous works, which include the ambitious, labyrinthine second world war thriller Transit, the Hitchcockian identity games of Phoenix and the mythic sub-aqua romance of Undine. Of course, this is still a Petzold film, so for all the superficial frothiness, there are churning currents beneath the surface that toy with darker themes – questions of mortality, of the nature of the creative process, of the looming climate crisis, in the form of the forest fires that rage just beyond the horizon. Not that Leon is aware of any of this as he peers through curtains and around door frames, aggrieved and hostile, waiting to be disappointed. The delicious irony of the character is that, despite spending much of the film covertly and clumsily spying on the other characters (Nadja in particular exerts a fascination), Leon views the world through the prism of his own smarting ego. Which means he sees virtually nothing of the emotional charges and social dynamics around him.
Cinema has frequently had a rather prickly and uneasy relationship with writers. It’s something that goes beyond the movie industry’s dismissive attitude to the contribution of its own screenwriters (the strikers currently picketing the studios in Burbank would probably have a few things to say on that subject) and frequently bleeds on to the screen into unflattering depictions of the profession. They are neurotic (Barton Fink), needy and self-absorbed (Listen Up Philip); they are parasites that suck on the lifeblood of the world around them (Black Bear). They are self-destructive (Reprise) and occasionally homicidal (The Shining). There’s also the fact that writers on screen are inevitably the creation of writers in the first place – which raises the question of the degree of autobiographical examination. Are writers as characters inevitably a kind of confessional?
Leon is still an axe attack or two away from the full Jack Torrance in The Shining, but he certainly manifests a fair few of the other traits. And while it’s hard to imagine that Petzold would have enjoyed the career he has, if Leon is an accurate alter ego, a personal element to this story seems possible. Petzold is on record as saying that his least favourite of his own films is the second, Cuba Libre. And Leon, knocked off kilter by the acclaim of his debut, is now foundering with his second book, titled Club Sandwich. We hear snippets from the manuscript, and it’s horrible. Prose spiky with adjectives and disdain; sophomoric posturing written from the heights of a self-appointed pedestal. The difficult second work is, the film suggests, something that needs to be created but is perhaps better forgotten as soon as possible.
The picture is effective as an interrogation of the nature and status of work in general. For Leon, work is something he announces with gravity and authority, but then role-plays, scowling and sweating over his typewriter. Felix is more openly a dilettante, but he is at least affable in his lanky, half-hearted pursuit of his artistic career. Nadja cheerfully sells ice-creams from a cart at the seafront, something that Leon can just about condone due to his grudging crush on her. He’s less forgiving of Devid (Enno Trebs), a lifeguard at the local beach. Schubert’s expressive physicality is put savagely to use in one particular scene, his face and body contorted by the force of his erupting derision over Devid’s career choice.
With the churning sexual tension, Leon’s perpetually simmering tantrums and the airy escapism of the plucked harp strings on the score, it’s easy to forget that a forest fire rages ever closer. A little too easy perhaps – details such as air quality and the sullen glow of the flames are registered only in passing. But maybe that’s the point. It’s a potent image after all: the characters are on the frontline of a climate emergency. And they’re oblivious, unable to grasp the threat until it’s too late.
In cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema
