Petzold, Christian

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

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    Christian Petzold’s new film, about a sour young writer and the woman he desires, generates both cruel comedy and heartbreak.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.AfireNot Rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Christian Petzold and a German Connection With His Films

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      After becoming known for movies distanced from his country’s history, culture and memory, he has drawn from them in some recent works.BERLIN — In the past decade, the German filmmaker Christian Petzold has made a Hitchcockian thriller set in postwar Germany, a time-tripping literary adaptation about exiles in occupied France and a magical realist fable about a water sprite in contemporary Berlin.In his latest film, “Afire,” showing at the Tribeca Festival, which runs June 7-18 in New York City, a young writer struggles to finish a novel at a summer home he is sharing with a beautiful stranger, while forest fires tear through the surrounding landscape.“Afire,” which will be released in theaters in the United States on July 14, won the Silver Bear grand jury prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in February. It was Mr. Petzold’s sixth time competing at the Berlinale, as the event is known here, where he has been a fixture since 2005 and where he won the best director trophy in 2012 for the tense period drama “Barbara,” about an East German doctor plotting to defect.Mr. Petzold, 62, is a leading figure in what is sometimes called the Berlin School, a loose movement of independent filmmakers who emerged in the 1990s and whose closely observed work, focused on small human dramas, refreshingly eschewed grand historical narratives. (“Unlike many German directors, Mr. Petzold has no interest in excavating the past,” a 2009 profile by The New York Times summed up.)But all of Mr. Petzold’s films from “Barbara” onward have found the director confronting his country’s history, culture and memory in a way that few would have expected from a filmmaker whose early works appeared to consciously rebuff mainstream German cinema’s emphasis on that nation’s tortured history — a trend exemplified recently by the Academy Award-winning 2022 remake of “All Quiet on the Western Front.”“He’s an extremely German filmmaker,” said Florian Borchmeyer, a programmer at the Munich International Film Festival who also works at Berlin’s Schaubühne theater.“He’s like a free radical, in some sense,” he continued, referring to how Mr. Petzold makes films outside the German film establishment. “He gets in touch with the trauma of German society and the German past. But at the same time,” he added, “he gets in connection with something that is almost beyond reality.”Speaking from the Cannes Film Festival in May, Mr. Borchmeyer called Mr. Petzold one of the best German filmmakers working today, along with Maren Ade (“Tony Erdmann”) and Angela Schanelec (whose “Music” won the screenplay award in Berlin this year), Philip Gröning and Andreas Dresen.Mr. Petzold had specific actors in mind when writing the screenplay for “Afire.”Sideshow and Janus Films“Afire” was not the film that Mr. Petzold set out to make. He had secured the film rights to Georges Simenon’s novel “Dirty Snow,” an existential noir set in an unnamed country under foreign occupation, and was writing the screenplay when the coronavirus pandemic broke out. After presenting his 2020 film “Undine” in Paris, Mr. Petzold and Paula Beer, the film’s lead (she also stars in “Afire”) came down with Covid-19.“I was in bed for four weeks with this dystopian project in front of me, and I thought: When I get out of here, I don’t want anything more to do with dystopias,” Mr. Petzold said in an interview.While convalescing in Berlin, he binge-watched films by the French New Wave director Éric Rohmer and read stories by Anton Chekhov. In that first pandemic spring, Mr. Petzold’s thoughts turned to summer and to summer films, a genre that, according to him, has not properly existed in Germany since “People on Sunday” (1930).“It’s a film about a day in summer, about young people, about Wannsee, about a weekend,” he said of the slice-of-life film, a key late work of Weimar cinema. “And then I thought about the aftermath, National Socialism, which destroyed everything: the German summers, the German youth, the German bodies, the poetry.“These are films that capture a feeling of being on a threshold,” he said, referring to works like Mr. Rohmer’s “La Collectionneuse” and “Pauline at the Beach,” which are clear touchstones for “Afire” in both content and tone.“There’s just two months, and after that you’re an adult. And in those two months there are slights, injuries, love, loss, loyalties, disappointments. And afterward, when you’re an adult, you remember that one summer when you perhaps missed out on life or first took advantage of life,” he continued, enumerating several of the themes that made their way into “Afire.”Along with French cinema and Russian literature, Mr. Petzold also drew inspiration from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in particular the play’s setting. William Shakespeare’s depiction of the woods as a place of enlightenment and enchantment resonated with the filmmaker and his own cultural background.“The forest in Germany is a place where you go when you have problems in order to find yourself again,” Mr. Petzold said. “That’s true of right-wing philosophers like [Martin] Heidegger, but it’s also true of German Romanticism.”Mr. Petzold, now 62, came out of the so-called Berlin School, a loose movement of independent filmmakers who emerged in the 1990s.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesIn the summer of 2020, as Mr. Petzold began developing “Afire,” those woods were very much on his mind, for an entirely different reason. “Those forests were burning, the forests that actually contain the German stories, the tales of the Brothers Grimm and so on,” Mr. Petzold said.Mr. Petzold wrote the screenplay for “Afire” with specific actors in mind: Thomas Schubert as the struggling young novelist Leon and Ms. Beer as his housemate Nadja. The film is a third collaboration for the actress and director after “Undine” and “Transit.”“Talking to him you feel how much he loves literature and stories,” Ms. Beer said, adding that “after reading the script together we will watch movies and he will talk about books that refer to our work.”The 28-year-old actress, who answered questions via email while serving on a jury at Cannes, said Mr. Petzold created a “very inspiring working atmosphere” on set.“Christian tells us his ideas about the scene, maybe other things that he was thinking of that fit to the atmosphere and situation,” she said, adding, “Every thought or idea is welcome.”Anton Kaiser, of Schramm Film, the Berlin-based production company behind “Afire” and 12 of Mr. Petzold’s previous films, said Mr. Petzold likes to shoot in the summer and edit in the fall, which means that his films tend to be ready in time for the Berlin festival, which is held in February.“Each film of Petzold’s is recognizable, but each new film is also a step forward,” Carlo Chatrian, the Berlin festival’s artistic director, said in a phone interview.“They are cerebral, but they are not heavy, especially the last two,” he added, referring to “Afire” and “Undine,” both of which he programmed at the festival, as films with a note of humor that is new for the director.“I’m happy, on one hand, to be able to support Christian Petzold as an auteur and as an artist,” Mr. Chatrian said. “At the same time, I’m happy when his films can travel, because I think it’s a pity that he is not enough known outside Germany.” More

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      French Documentary ‘On the Adamant’ Wins Top Prize at Berlin Film Festival

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      Christian Petzold’s “Afire” took the runner-up award at this year’s Berlinale, where geopolitical crises in Europe and Iran loomed large.The top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, the Golden Bear, was awarded to “On the Adamant,” a French documentary about a floating barge in central Paris that offers care to people with mental disorders.The immersive feature, filmed by the documentarian Nicolas Philibert over several months, follows the patients of the facility as they create music and artwork that often reflect their personal stories. The festival’s top award is rarely given to a documentary, and in his acceptance speech, a clearly surprised Philibert asked the jury members if they were “crazy.”He said that he had made the film in part to reverse the “stigmatizing” views many have of people with mental health issues, and that his film aimed to erase the distinction between patients and caregivers. “What unites us is a feeling of common humanity,” he said.This year’s jury was led by the American actress Kristen Stewart and included the Spanish director Carla Simón, whose “Alcarràs” took the top award last year, and the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani.The runner-up prize went to “Afire” by the German director Christian Petzold, a fixture of the festival. The dry comedy centers on an acerbic novelist ensconced in a vacation home who is forced to reckon with his self-image amid an encroaching forest fire. A special jury prize was given to the Portuguese filmmaker João Canijo’s “Bad Living,” a drama about a group of women running a decaying hotel.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.The best director award went to Philippe Garrel, a veteran French filmmaker, for “The Plough,” a drama about a family of puppeteers that stars three of his real-life children. The gender-neutral award for best performance was given to Sofía Otero, a first-time actor, who played an 8-year-old grappling with gender identity in “20,000 Species of Bees.” The tearful speech by Otero, the youngest to win the award, left many in the audience crying.The award for best screenplay was given to Angela Schanelec’s “Music,” an elliptical retelling of the myth of Oedipus, and the award for best supporting performance went to Thea Ehre, who played a transgender ex-convict working with a police investigator in Christoph Hochhäusler’s “Till the End of the Night.”Although the Berlinale has long been the most political of the major international festivals, this year’s edition was especially touched by world events. Two previous winners of the Golden Bear — the Iranian directors Jafar Panahi, whose film “Taxi Tehran” won in 2015, and Mohammad Rasoulof, whose film “There Is No Evil” won in 2020 — were imprisoned in recent months for opposing the Iranian government. (Both were eventually released.) During the festival’s glossy opening gala, Farahani, who is herself exiled from Iran, drew a lengthy standing ovation for a rousing speech in which she called for Europe to stand on the “right side of history” by supporting Iranian protesters.This year’s festival also featured several films about Ukraine, including “Iron Butterflies,” about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, and “Superpower,” a documentary by the actor and director Sean Penn that includes an interview with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, filmed the night of the Russian invasion. Appearing at the opening gala via video link, Zelensky praised the Berlinale for its “principle of openness, equality and dialogue without borders.” Although Russian filmmakers were allowed at this year’s festival, films that had been financed by the Russian government were banned.After two years of pandemic disruptions and restrictions, this year’s festival — one of the largest in the world by audience numbers — was a return to sold-out theaters, industry parties and red-carpet glamour. The attendees included Anne Hathaway, whose absurdist comedy “She Came to Me” opened the festival, and Steven Spielberg, who was on hand to accept an honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement.This year’s competition lineup was heavy on German directors and notably broad in tone and scope. It included two animated features — “Suzume” from Japan and “Art College 1994” from China — as well as “BlackBerry,” a Canadian comedy about the inventors of the eponymous hand-held device, and “Manodrome,” a violent drama about one man’s crisis of masculinity starring Jesse Eisenberg.Some of the buzzier titles screened outside of competition, such as “Passages,” an erotic drama featuring the German actor Franz Rogowski, a Berlinale favorite. Sydney Sweeney, who stars in the American TV series “Euphoria,” also drew acclaim for her performance in “Reality,” a drama about Reality Winner, the intelligence contractor who leaked classified reports to the press in 2017.German critics have largely praised organizers this year for balancing a focus on global events with artistic ambition and glitz. Alongside screenings, the festival included several explicitly political events, including a protest on the red carpet on Friday to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Several of the award winners also acknowledged the political context in their speeches, including Canijo, who ended his with a Ukrainian rallying cry, “Slava Ukraini,” or “Glory to Ukraine.” More

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      ‘Undine’ Review: Love In and Out of the Water

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      Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, who made an impression in 2019’s “Transit,” are reunited by the director Christian Petzold for this adaptation of a European myth.At an outdoor table of a small cafe situated on the ground floor of an imposing brick building, two lovers are ending their affair. The woman of the pair, not happy with this development, bickers with the man about a voice mail message. When that thread is exhausted, she tells him matter-of-factly, “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you.”Well, that escalated quickly. The woman, whose name is Undine — played with equal parts passion and calculation by Paula Beer — retains our sympathy even as she makes that unreasonable pronouncement. Because, as it happens, it’s not unreasonable. Undine is not mentally ill or morally reckless. What she’s talking about here is fate. With seemingly minimal means, the writer-director Christian Petzold makes the viewer understand this, mere minutes into the story, adapted from a European myth about a water sprite who can fall in love and become human, but who must suffer greatly if her lover is unfaithful.This modern-day Undine is, on land, a historian who instructs wealthy tourists on Berlin’s aesthetic and political schisms over the centuries. These sessions lead to sometimes tense exchanges: an evocation of “an architecture in keeping with national tradition,” for example, prompts the question, “Hadn’t the Nazis discredited nationalism?”But Petzold doesn’t hammer the potential for political parable or allegory here — which is a little surprising, given the lessons on modern German history he offers up in pictures such as “Phoenix.” Instead, this fractured not-quite-fairy-tale parcels out provocative instances of magical realism on arguably larger themes.After being ditched by her sniveling partner Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), Undine almost immediately retreats into the cafe, where she fixates on a small statue of a helmeted sea diver in a fish tank. The aquarium vibrates and soon explodes, knocking her to the floor with another man, Christoph (Franz Rogowski). They’re both drenched, and she’s a bit cut up by shards from the tank.This peculiar meet-cute is handled straightforwardly (the movie’s clean, economical production design, by Merlin Ortner, grounds the picture in this respect), as are the story’s other fantastic elements — including an ethereal catfish and a diving outing during which Undine mysteriously sheds her wet suit, flippers and oxygen tank.Undine’s new love — the kind, compassionate and knowing Christoph (he and Beer were also paired in Petzold’s prior film, “Transit”) — is himself a diver. Being near him makes Undine feel more at home, so to speak. But Christoph’s work, welding underwater turbines, is risky. Soon Undine is presented with a dilemma that forces her to confront a fate she had hoped her new happiness would help her avoid.Petzold’s cinematic storytelling style is elegant but unfussy, perfectly complemented by Hans Fromm’s cinematography and by the sparely used music, which includes the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson’s dreamy interpretations of Bach and the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” “Undine” is ultimately more enigmatic than most of Petzold’s work. It is also, like its title character, eerily beautiful. While it could well serve as a high-end date movie, it’s also something more.UndineNot rated. In German and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More