One would have to travel back to Hollywood’s golden age to find a director who can write parts for women the way Christian Petzold has done for Nina Hoss (Jerichow, Barbara, Phoenix) and Paula Beer (Transit, Undine). The latter has a delicious and deceptive role in Afire, playing Nadja, a Russian maid and ice-cream seller.
For Leon (Thomas Schubert), the novelist and windbag at the centre of the film, she’s an object of desire and frustration. How dare she prefer the fun-loving company of his genial travelling companion, Felix (Langston Uibel, superb), and the local lifeguard, Devid (Enno Trebs)?
Leon is struggling with his second novel, an unpromising-sounding manuscript called Club Sandwich – insert your own Spinal Tap joke – and with Nadja’s boisterous nocturnal activities with Devid, or the “rescue swimmer”, as he prefers to be known. Worse still, Leon discovers that Nadja is not merely his intellectual equal but his intellectual better.
The quartet are stuck together in a holiday home on the Baltic coast because of a double booking. Stung by his cleaning lady’s criticism that the new work is “a bit schmaltzy”, the fervently self-involved Leon fails to heed an early warning from Felix that “something’s not right”. Sounds of squealing pigs and water-bombing aircraft are ignored. Mostly, Leon pouts, procrastinates and grandly refuses friendly invitations: “My work won’t allow it.”
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Caustic comedy and social awkwardness slowly give way to something like folkloric horror as a vast forest fire descends with Hitchcockian tenacity upon the beachside residence. A visit from Leon’s publisher, Helmut (Matthias Brandt), is disastrous in surprising ways.
Christian Petzold, the film’s writer as well as director, rightly took home Berlin’s Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize for this genre-defying comedy of manners. The German master deftly weaves ecological catastrophe, sexual capering and a portrait of beta masculinity into a plot that, at first glance, could be a holiday-from-hell sitcom episode. It’s also the fiery part of a proposed elemental trilogy that began with the water-themed Undine.
The unfussy Berlin School style allows Petzold’s script to crackle. Beer, as ever, blazes quietly. Bring on the air-themed instalment.
