Afire: Germany’s most admired contemporary film-maker didn’t realise how funny – and revealing – his new movie is

Three years ago the German film director Christian Petzold was promoting his mermaid drama Undine in Paris when he and its star, Paula Beer, noticed Emmanuel Macron on television. The announcement was unambiguous: lockdown in effect, immediately. The new social-distancing protocols came too late for Petzold and Beer. They were already infected with Covid.

“I think we were the first patients in Germany,” the film-maker says. “Laboratory technicians were calling and asking, ‘Can you give us your blood?’ I had to lie down in bed for weeks, having fever dreams. I had a script based on a dystopian story by Georges Simenon, about young people under fascism. During Covid I said to myself, I never want to make a dystopian movie again. And I don’t want to see a fascist again in my movies.

[ Undine: Enjoyably fishy goings-on in Berlin ]

“It’s something I miss in the cinema. I’m surrounded by cinema about destroying and rebuilding the world. It’s like Sim City. I wanted to make something set in our time where the complexity is great and the anger is great and the idiots are great. I had a teacher at the film academy who used to say that you have to make movies so that, in 30 years, people will know how we kissed and how we betrayed in our time.”

The result is Afire, an exhilarating mash-up of ecothriller, contemporary folk horror and romantic comedy. There are shades of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces about Thomas Schubert’s Leon, the self-regarding sophomore novelist at the centre of an awkward summer holiday. Leon hopes a seaside sojourn will allow him to finish a dismal-sounding new manuscript called Club Sandwich. He’s distracted, however, by the presence of his rowdy art-student friend (Langston Uibei), an attractive Russian housekeeper (Beer), her lifeguard boyfriend (Enno Trebs) and the forest fire that is encroaching on the entire area.

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Petzold initially didn’t realise how funny – and possibly revealing – Afire is. After a screening in New York, the director was asked if the film was a horror movie about himself.

“It’s like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – except it’s a portrait of an artist as an asshole,” he says, laughing. “I had written down this bad novel Club Sandwich. And it’s very hard to write a bad novel. Because you have to think that this is a good novel. We started our rehearsals in Berlin three months before shooting. And during our first rehearsals everybody started laughing about these pages. I was hurt. Vanity came in, because it was hard work, and I don’t want to make jokes about this. And then one of the actors asked me to tell the story of Cuba Libre, which was my second film, and it’s a movie I hate. And everybody started laughing again, because they said Club Sandwich and Cuba Libre look very similar.”

Afire was partly inspired by the seasonal romances of Éric Rohmer: the French distributor of Undine is Margaret Menegoz, of Les Films du Losange, who was also a producer of many Rohmer movies. She gave Petzold a box set of 25 Rohmer films as he made his way back to Germany during the pandemic. The director found further inspiration in the US equivalent of the summer movie, or France’s éducation sentimentale, as exemplified by The Myth of the American Sleepover. Chekhov’s The House with the Mezzanine was another talisman.

“The summer movie is a genre because the summer is a very important time. For example, we have two months of summer in France when the classes are mixed and when very poor people meet very rich people at the beach. The experience of summer gives you an identity, being by the sea and being stuck with people. You have the same in the USA with horror movies: they are set in summer. There are young people in cars, a cabin in the woods, and a guy with a chainsaw that has problems with his sexuality.

“There is a lack of summer films in Germany because – I must say it – the Nazis made summer films. I haven’t seen the Jonathan Glazer film [The Zone of Interest] yet, but we have the same casting agent, and she has talked a lot about this: that the film runs parallel to the Nazi summer films.”

Petzold’s film equally runs parallel, albeit in a very different direction from Glazer’s haunting concentration-camp film.

“When I was young, I had the feeling there are thousands of summers in the future. But for my kids, who are 23 and 27, they have the feeling there are not so many summers left. Because they are aware of climate catastrophe.”

Following on from the watery-themed Undine, Afire is the latest instalment in the director’s planned elemental sequence. It marks his third collaboration with Beer, part of a troupe of several distinguished Petzold regulars that also includes Nina Hoss and Franz Rogowski.

“I don’t own them,” Petzold says. “They are independent. They’re a little bit lonely, a little bit in exile. I always have the feeling they don’t need me, that they have a life outside the frame. I’ve made six films with Nina. She’s aristocratic. Paula is a dancer. And she dances through the movies. Paula and Franz never went to an actor’s school. He did something with circus and clowns. There’s a scene in Transit in which Paula and Franz had to kiss in my script. And in rehearsal they didn’t kiss; they held hands. And it was fantastic. I never believe in kissing in movies nowadays. Not like kissing in the 30s and 40s. All the tongue kissing nowadays looks sh*t.”

[ Transit: A five-star, art-house modern-day Casablanca ]

Petzold, Germany’s most important film-maker to emerge this side of the new German cinema movement of the 1960s and 1970s, has so far taken home five prizes from the Berlinale; Afire is his second film to win the Silver Bear, for best director, at the festival. He has even made his way into German classrooms with Transit, his brilliant contemporary staging of Anna Seghers’s 1944 war novel.

“It’s now part of the curriculum at high schools. So my son, for example, had to watch the film in the classroom. And then my name appeared and someone asked: is he a relative to you? Of course, he said, ‘No, I’ve never heard of him.’”

Afire opens in cinemas on Friday, August 25th