Afire: Christian Petzold finds his funnybone

• Reviewed from the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival.

In his late 19^th-century poem ‘The Asra’, Heinrich Heine wrote of the titular Yemeni tribe who “perish when they love”. This poem features in one pivotal scene in Christian Petzold’s Afire, but its sentiment pervades the film as a whole: how can an all-consuming love – for another person, for a craft, for yourself – be survived or tamed? It’s a grand thesis in a film that employs far more humour than perhaps any of the director’s previous work, but in Petzold’s masterly hands, gravity and comedy work in easy and thrilling harmony.

As forest fires loom on the edge of a Baltic coastal town, friends Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix (Langston Uibel) arrive to spend the summer in Felix’s family holiday home and work on their respective artistic projects. But a woman named Nadja (Petzold mainstay Paula Beer) has beaten them to it, making herself comfortable in the idyllic house and keeping Leon up all night by having loud sex with her lifeguard fling, Devid (Enno Trebs). She’s the niece of a family friend and neither Felix nor Leon knows her at all – initially we encounter her only as a disembodied noise and soon after as a near-apparition, cycling away from the house. It’s Petzold’s way of signalling Leon’s misconceptions and dismissal of her, underlined by immediate romantic attraction – she is an object of desire and little else in Leon’s eyes.

The group dynamic highlights Leon’s obtuseness but more so his insecurity. He is adamant about his need to work on his latest novel – amusingly titled ‘Club Sandwich’ and featuring more than a few cleavage descriptions – and incapable of finding the time for social activities. This is partly because he’s intimidated by Nadja but also because he prefers to pretend to write than to actually do it. He cares about being perceived not as a fun, artsy procrastinator like photographer Felix, but as a serious thinker. Schubert is fantastically moody in the role, with Petzold’s droll script belittling the character but stopping short of demolishing him entirely. Leon is often selfish and pitiful, but he’s not blind to his own failings.

Afire’s plot is slight but its capturing of character and the skewering of Leon’s fragility are sharp and layered. During dinner one evening, Leon begins an unfair interrogation of Devid, of whom he is critical and, of course, jealous. But his questioning also suggests something more invasive – the gathering of material for future writing, perhaps. Whether or not this draws on Petzold’s insecurities about his own creative process is debatable; in any case, the film’s whole narrative will come to be defined by Leon’s compulsion to turn the starkest tragedy or even just a close personal encounter into something to be fictionalised, and thus something to prove his intellectual worth. When Nadja’s own intellect finally becomes apparent to him, in a scene that dazzles with the pleasure of its narrative twist and Schubert’s immaculate depiction of Leon’s internal combustion, his need to eclipse her and everyone else only grows. It’s powered by his fear of creative irrelevance (in the eyes of his literary peers) and romantic redundancy – Nadja can expose both. Reading Heine’s poem to the group, she becomes the film’s most active, impressive voice; Leon’s undoing rests at her fingertips.

The recurring hypnotic, woozy sounds of the track ‘in my mind’ by Austrian band Wallners soundtrack the film, with a subdued sense of sex and tension in the melody. As with many of Petzold’s previous films, he toys with these tensions and secret desires; Afire doesn’t enter the explicit psychological thriller territory of something like Yella (2007) or Jerichow (2008) but its teasing out of the emotional shifts in character dynamics, and the gradually intensifying pace of the action, all while the forest fires get closer and closer, amount to an electric sense of atmosphere. Petzold’s concerns with love as a consuming force, which were on display in recent works Transit (2018) and Undine (2020), continue to inspire some of his most poetic onscreen relationships. Afire may take a more straightforward, realist path than the otherworldly Undine, but it captures the same essence of passion’s potential for devastation, while the interrogation of Leon’s woes as both writer and man – his pathetic self-pity and fractured self-esteem – gives the film a levity not often seen in Petzold’s work. By taking a more comic approach, the director homes in on the humanity of it all. The embarrassment of love and failure – how funny and how grave.