Christian Petzold’s Afire is what happens when you drop a miserable guy in a summery French sex farce.
Protagonist Leon (Thomas Schubert) is a pompous writer who travels with his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) to Felix’s mother’s vacation home near the Baltic Sea. Leon is there to work on his novel — called Club Sandwich — which he hopes to put the finishing touches on before his editor (Matthias Brandt) shows up for a read-through. But his pal, who is also there to work on photos for an art school application, would rather head to the beach and go for a swim. Leon is hardly down for any of that. (When he does tag along with Felix to the beach, he’s decked out in a dark wardrobe and is either reading or sleeping.)
Leon is already miffed that he has to share the house with Nadja (Petzold regular Paula Beer), a lady who’s already made herself at home when the boys get there. While she spends her days scooping ice cream for vacationers at a nearby hotel, she also spends her nights keeping Leon awake with the loud sex she has with Devid (Enno Trebs), the beach’s resident studly lifeguard. Although he does everything possible not to bring any attention to it, Leon is clearly smitten with this mysterious gal. All the while, forest fires are coming in from the west, slowly heading to where they’re staying.
German writer-director Petzold (Undine, Transit) has said Afire was inspired by watching Eric Rohmer movies while he was stuck in bed with COVID. Indeed, the movie feels like the work of someone who has watched a bunch of fun, erotic French flicks and wondered just how the hell people live like that. (I wonder if Petzold caught the successful 2021 rerelease of Jacques Deray’s La Piscine, in which Romy Schneider, Alain Delon and the recently departed Jane Birkin spend most of the movie either lounging half-naked by the pool or boning each other.) As he tries to work on his manuscript from the front-yard pergola, Leon quietly observes the frivolous, flirty activities going on between Nadja, Felix and Devid. He retaliates by being snippy and dismissive to his housemates. He chides Felix for choosing to take photos of people looking at the sea for his art school application, and later gets in his feelings when Nadja gives her unsatisfactory opinion of Club Sandwich. It isn’t long before Leon is the only person in the house who hasn’t gotten any.
I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much I felt seen while watching Afire, a movie about a guy who longs to be cool, carefree and carnal like his more attractive housemates, but is too awkward and angry to take the plunge. We all have a Leon in our lives — hell, some of us are Leon. Petzold has admitted there’s a lot of him in his main character, which makes Afire yet another fascinating study of a filmmaker who is self-aware enough to know how much of an insufferable prick he can be. Schubert really gets his asshole on as Leon, making practically every get-together he’s at seem cringey and uncomfortable because of his negative energy. You’ll probably spend most of the movie seesawing between despising him and feeling sorry for him.
It isn’t until those damn fires (a metaphor for Leon’s dangerous, unwieldy emotions?) approach in the third act that Leon realizes how good he had it. Instead of indulging in the temporary utopia he’s been blessed with, with good friends and a woman who is surprisingly intrigued by him, he rebels against it. He chooses to “suffer” alone for his art, something even his editor (who we learn is going through some things of his own) encourages him not to do.
While some people may see Afire as a movie about a jerk ruining a lovely summer vacation, there will be others who see it as a film about a person who has absolutely no clue what to do with joy, even when it’s been handed to them. It’s a road a lot of us sad, self-centered sons-a-bitches have been down one too many times.
