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.
