Review: Few of this summer’s movies burn as fiercely as Christian Petzold’s ‘Afire’

Leon (Thomas Schubert), the exasperated — and exasperating — young writer at the heart of the superb German drama “Afire,” has a mesmerizingly punchable scowl. It’s a scowl that rarely leaves your memory, since it so rarely leaves his features: a full-lipped mouth that hangs contemptuously half-open; eyes that glare lazily ahead, as though so worn down by irritation they couldn’t even be bothered to roll properly.

Trying to revise his (wretchedly bad) novel over a few days’ countryside retreat, Leon is beset by one unreasonable demand after another: How dare his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) invite him to go for a swim, or ask him to help patch a leak in the roof? How can Leon possibly be expected to lift a finger or even flash a smile? Can’t everyone see how much work he has to do?

He does have a lot of work to do, though not the kind he thinks. From the moment we meet Leon, riding shotgun while Felix drives, he is sour, disagreeable company, as well as a one-man rebuke to the notion that likable protagonists are always the most compelling. When Felix’s car breaks down, stranding them and their bags in the middle of the woods, Leon has nothing to offer beyond complaints. When they finally make it to their destination and find they’ll be sharing it with an unexpected houseguest, Leon grumbles and despairs of getting anything done. He’s not entirely wrong to feel put out, given the closeness of the quarters and the nightly sounds of music and sexual congress issuing from the room next door.

But a more gracious visitor would find plenty to enjoy and appreciate here. The house, which belongs to Felix’s never-seen mother, has a spacious backyard with a cozy, writing-friendly pergola. It’s also just a short walk or bike ride away from a lovely, lightly tourist-strewn beach overlooking the Baltic Sea. And then there’s the houseguest herself, Nadja (Paula Beer), a young woman with fetchingly windswept hair, a friendly smile and sparkling eyes that, it soon becomes clear, miss nothing.

Thomas Schubert and Paula Beer in the movie “Afire.”

(Sideshow and Janus Films)

Certainly Nadja can see the mix of irritation, condescension and inconvenient desire with which Leon regards her. She does her best to return his baffled, besotted gaze with decency and kindness, though she can’t resist delivering, when warranted, a stinging rebuke. Naturally, she gets along swimmingly with the more easygoing Felix, and also with a handsome lifeguard, Devid (Enno Trebs), whose regular presence around the house drives Leon from distraction to outright hostility. Scowling silently as Felix and his new friends laugh and smile their way through idyllic outings and alfresco dinners, Leon is a consummate stick in the mud. He’s the guy who can’t help but suck the life out of the party, the guy who shows up at the beach dressed in black from head to toe.

Tracking these tense dynamics with an unerringly well-placed camera (the cinematographer is Hans Fromm) and fluid, intuitive editing (by Bettina Böhler), the writer-director Christian Petzold turns this scenically remote destination into an emotional and psychological trap. And also, perhaps, a literal one: “Afire,” as suggested by its title and the regular noise of water-bombing planes flying overhead, takes place in the midst of an especially rough wildfire season. It’s hard not to wonder exactly how Petzold plans to use this encroaching threat: Given the brush-heavy environs, spotty Wi-Fi and lack of a functioning vehicle, is this a full-scale disaster movie in the making? Or do those flames licking at the horizon serve a more symbolic purpose, echoing the dynamics of a house where tempers turn fiery and the emotional temperature is always on the rise?

To answer that question would spoil one (though not all) of “Afire’s” surprises. Throughout this movie, an absorbing, barbed and frequently funny evisceration of artistic ego, Petzold practices a deft and disarming sleight of hand, using key details to keep the viewer off balance and deliver a stinging rebuke to Leon’s myopia. His particular brand of obliviousness — clear to everyone, but especially to his impatient publisher (Matthias Brandt) — is not, the movie suggests, exactly uncommon among certain kinds of artists. Happily, there are also those like Felix, a photographer who has his own looming portfolio deadline but none of his friend’s self-importance. He doesn’t have to be “working,” as Leon defines it, to stumble on new perspectives and fresh sources of beauty, inspiration and insight.

The difference between simply looking and actually seeing, between mere sensation and deeper perception, is hardly a new theme in Petzold’s work. In “Phoenix” (2015), his suavely haunting postwar riff on “Vertigo,” one character’s failure to recognize another reads as a kind of moral blindness. But while “Afire” wrings its own variation on that idea, it also represents a departure from the historically fraught, morally contemplative political thrillers, like “Barbara” and “Transit,” that shaped the director’s critical reputation. With its genre-adjacent premise, barbed character interplay, sharply chiseled performances and portents of meteorological disaster, “Afire” might be Petzold’s most accessible work in some time. (It won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival.) It’s a story about the here and now; it’s also about men and women, love and friendship, and the way art often draws from, and frequently distorts, the stuff of everyday life.

For all its low-key moment-to-moment realism, the movie at times folds in a layer of abstraction, whether in the sudden emergence of a narrator’s voice or the strategic repetition of “In My Mind,” a moody dream-pop song by the Viennese band Wallners. It’s a song that even Leon can’t help getting lost in, maybe because it’s hypnotic and beautiful, or maybe because it seems to capture his own retreat into a dreamily narcissistic head-space.

It’s a measure of this movie’s compassion, rather than its cruelty, that Nadja — played with exquisite delicacy and pinpoint comic timing by Beer, Petzold’s frequent collaborator of late — is on hand to yank him back out. She doesn’t wipe that scowl off Leon’s face, though she does suggest that it might be more productively directed inward.

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‘Afire’

(Not rated)

(In German with English subtitles)

Running time: 1 hour, 43 minutes

Playing: Starts July 14 at Laemmle Royal, West Los Angeles