‘Afire’ movie review: Christian Petzold’s lacklustre navel-gazing slop
The great Richard Yates once wrote, “Start a story off with ‘Craig crushed out his cigarettes and lunged for the typewriter,’ and there isn’t an editor in the United States who’ll feel like reading your next sentences”. In the current cinematic landscape, the equivalent has to be quasi-identical films about self-absorbed creatives that live too far up their own asses to be affected by the rapidly deteriorating housing markets. The latest culprit is none other than German director Christian Petzold.
Petzold’s feature Roter Himmel (Red Sky but translated to Afire) is the newest addition to this oversaturated oeuvre, almost apologetic about its own existence. It stars Thomas Schubert as Leon, an antisocial writer who decides to take a “workcation” in his photographer friend Felix’s (played by Langston Uibel) summer house on the Baltic Sea. While the people around him are busy enjoying the summer, Leon spends his hours hiding from his friends, as well as his disastrous novel in progress.
Schubert delivers an impressively repulsive performance, exuding misery and cynicism at every step of the way. Simultaneously disgusted by and defensive of his own work, Leon is riddled with his insecurities and lives in fear of any criticism directed towards his creations. It’s a part that requires courage because the character is specifically designed to elicit visceral hatred from audiences, but Schubert is confident in his ability to play an asshole, and it shows.
It’s clear that Petzold intended to create a film about a pathetic artist who couldn’t see the forest for the trees, worrying about publishing deals and coming across as intelligent in a world that was burning down around him. Maybe it came from a place of self-criticism generated by the anxiety of making movies about a world that’s currently facing several major existential threats. But it fails miserably, unable to provide any meaningful insights.
Supplemented by the uninspired cinematography of Hans Fromm, Afire is everything that the world doesn’t need right now. Weary, hollow images come together hesitantly to form an annoying portrait of four young people by the sea, helmed in by escalating forest fires. To Petzold’s credit, it was surprisingly funny to watch a film about increasingly unstable environmental conditions and actually find myself rooting for the forest fire.
At a time when the catastrophic consequences of climate change are more evident than ever, this kind of half-hearted ecocriticism seen through the terrifyingly bourgeois lens of self-actualisation is dangerously antithetical. There is no room for a work like Afire when we desperately need more films like How to Blow Up a Pipeline that grab us by our collars and don’t stop shaking until the bleak reality of our semi-extinct future dawns upon us.
Even if you’re going to make a navel-gazing exploration of the creative process, at least have the decency to take a page out of Charlie Kaufman’s book and stop pretending you care about anything other than yourself.
