For maximum immersion, you should watch this movie while sleepy. In director Christian Petzold’s Afire, Thomas Schubert plays Leon, a young novelist struggling to write his next book. He also falls asleep a lot when he should be writing: on the beach, on a bench, many places. He’s kept awake most nights by different permutations of the other characters in the movie having noisy sex. The soundtrack is mostly not music. Instead we get lush and soothing white noise: waves, wind, gnats, the beachside noises outside a hotel room window, even the rustling of a plastic bag getting emptied of the goulash it contains. The song that plays near the midpoint of the movie and again over the end credits is dreamlike. It feels nice to be under the trance of the movie.
The gentle environment of the film is threatened by encroaching wildfires and Leon’s difficult personality and Schubert’s brilliant ability for making a stank face. The other characters challenge and bring him down when necessary though, making Leon likeable. Schubert has the quality of a younger, sexier Rodney Dangerfield, bringing some nice comedy to the many moments Leon gets no respect.
The other characters are generally beautiful and incredibly kind. Langston Uibel plays Leon’s friend Felix, a budding photographer who inherited the beach house they’re staying at. Enno Trebbs plays Devid, the “rescue swimmer” Leon cannot stop himself from calling a “lifeguard.” Paula Beer plays Nadja, the ice cream stand worker who hides a major detail of her life from Leon, almost playing a cruel trick on him.
In stark contrast to Leon’s moodiness, everyone else greets each other so warmly. They also always make sure to invite Leon to swim with them. Despite these invitations, he never even removes his running shoes to feel the sand in his feet.
The movie seems to operate on a dream logic. We talked about goulash a lot and some of the goulash was in a plastic bag. I was working on my new novel but I had titled it “Club Sandwich” for some reason. You went to the hospital for a kidney stone but then it turned into cancer. The dreaminess helps to make sense of the ending, which is to say the ending didn’t make complete sense.
The soothingness of the movie reaches its peak with Nadja reading Heinrich Heine’s poem “The Asra”. Felix immediately asks her to read it again and I wanted to hear it again too. Like a plastic bag containing goulash, the poem must contain a key to the film’s meaning. I don’t know if putting goulash in a plastic bag is normal in Germany. My home province of Ontario has been ridiculed for putting milk in plastic bags. You snip the corner of the milk bag with scissors so you can pour the milk out safely.
Felix notes the unusual spelling of Devid’s name, saying it’s a quirk of the East Germany days. Leon gets caught making fun of how a woman pronounces the name ‘Uwe Johnson’. These are like the small details that are slightly off in a dream. Leon sees wild boars fleeing the forest fires. One is burnt to death in front of him. He tells Nadja about it and she explicitly calls out the dream-like quality of what he says he saw.
One final important character will show up, Matthias Brandt as Leon’s editor Helmut. Tasked with having to tell Leon about the problems with his manuscript, he still manages to come across as very nice. He also shows a warm curiosity for Felix’s photography and Nadja’s literary work. Felix is developing a photo series of people looking at the sea coupled with portraits of their faces as they look at it. Leon initially objects that it’s impossible to take a portrait of someone looking at the sea because a camera in their face will distort their expression. Helmut sees more in it. He suggests a third level to project, a picture of the sea by itself. So you got the observer observing, the observer being observed, and the observer’s observed sea. This sounds like the rapidly shifting perspectives of a dream to me.
© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.