‘Afire’ Review: His Flaws Are Petty, Pathetic and Funny

The German filmmaker Christian Petzold’s spiky and at times mordantly funny “Afire” is a tonic for moviegoers tired of nice, squishable, likable, relatable dull and dull characters. It’s a look — for starters — at a splenetic young writer who, during a stay in the country, waits for his publisher to weigh in on his unfortunately titled second novel “Club Sandwich.” He frets that it’s no good, though his arrogance is sturdier and more consuming than his doubts. Yet while the writer is boorish, he’s never insipid; he’s pleasurably bad company.

There’s far more to this lamentable creature as you learn, and would expect from Petzold. One of the most reliably interesting and surprising filmmakers working today, Petzold makes sharp, visually intelligent, psychologically sophisticated movies. He likes working in traditional genres that he bends to his own purposes while drawing on a range of cinematic traditions: classical Hollywood, the European art film, the avant-garde. He’s probably best known in the United States for “Barbara” (2012) and “Transit” (2019), atmospheric thrillers in which characters — one in East Germany, the other in a present-day Nazi-like limbo — seek to escape states of terror that are both apparatuses of power and conditions of being.

“Afire” is lighter in tone and feeling. Petzold has said that, among other influences, he was inspired by the films of Éric Rohmer, as well as French and American coming-of-age stories set in summer. Yet he likes to mix it up, and “Afire” opens with a teasingly ominous sequence that finds the writer and a friend driving on a country road in a car that soon breaks down, leaving them stranded. By the time night falls, the tone has darkened, as have the surrounding woods, which now seems like a setting for one of those horror flicks in which nubile kids in cutoffs are sacrificed to the gods of cinema.

The writer, Leon (Thomas Schubert), and his friend, Felix (Langston Uibel), make it relatively unscathed to their destination, a vacation home on Germany’s Baltic coast. Compact and inviting, the house is owned by Felix’s mother, and has two bedrooms and a leaky roof. There, the men will be alone while Leon waits for his publisher and Felix readies an art-school portfolio. When they arrive, though, they find that the mother has invited a third, a stranger to the men named Nadja (Paula Beer). She’s nowhere to be seen, but her traces — wine glasses on the table, discarded clothing on the floor — perfume the house.

In time, a story of sorts emerges, though Petzold is less interested in creating a strong narrative here than he is in charting the complexities of character and the ties that bind and lash, create and destroy. The movie could be titled “The Portrait of the Artist as Young Douchebag,” to abusively borrow from Joyce’s autobiographical novel, though the movie is more snapshot than portrait. Largely set over a few days, it traces the emotional and psychological entanglements that emerge once the men meet Nadja, an initially indistinct, intriguingly elusive figure in red, one who Leon voyeuristically observes from afar.

Petzold is a fast worker and within minutes of the movie opening, you know that Leon is a pill but also a bit ridiculous. In the first scene, when Felix asks if he hears a noise while they’re driving, Leon dismissively waves him off and cranks the music just before the engine dies. Soon, Leon is waving off Felix’s invitation to go to the beach, insisting that he has to work and that Felix should too, a pattern that continues. Instead, Leon glumly sits before his manuscript, squinting at the sun and swatting at flies, a monument to the epic narcissism that will isolate him, and generate both cruel comedy and heartbreak.

Much of the movie takes place in and around the house, which is set in a pretty clearing ringed by trees. Petzold makes eloquent use of the space, turning the airy house into a stage and the grounds — and the pergola under which Leon works, though more often doesn’t — into a kind of arena. From his uncomfortable vantage, Leon watches as Felix, a sweet, open-faced man, busily comes and goes. Their friendship never feels persuasively grounded in any kind of history (love or even habit), and for the most part it registers as a screenwriting contrivance, even if Felix’s decency does sharply and regularly amplify Leon’s faults.

Those flaws are manifold, pathetic and sometimes painful, though also wincingly comic. Playing a jerk might not sound difficult, but actors want to be loved, even when playing villains, which makes Schubert’s belligerent, insistently uncomfortable performance all the more impressive. There isn’t a drop of ingratiation in it. With his doughy body and his soft, spherical face — which is often bunched up in sour complaint — Leon can resemble an overgrown colicky (or gassy) baby. If dyspepsia were all there was to him there might not be much to the movie. But Leon has desire — perhaps for Nadja included — which makes him interesting to spend time with and certainly more so than he would be if you were sharing a summer house with him.

Petzold complicates things further with two other characters, an affable lifeguard (Enno Trebs) and Leon’s publisher (Matthias Brandt). In flowing, naturalistic scenes, Petzold plots assorted human coordinates — friendship and romance, jealousy and enmity — that deepen the movie’s emotional register. Beds are shared, abandoned, swapped, and Leon grows close to Nadja, who, like Felix, feels too generous in her dealings with Leon to be fully convincing. But Beer is appealing and her character is a lovely idea, and so too is the hope, romantic and otherwise, that Nadja with her welcoming smile inspires, especially because a fire is fast-racing toward the house, threatening to engulf a world that is already smoldering.

Afire
Not Rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters.