roter himmel (w&d christian petzold)

Roter Himmel could be translated as Red Sky. (Rather than the approved English title, which is the clumsy “Afire”.) The sky is red because there are forest fires on the Baltic coast of Germany where Leon has gone with his friend, Felix, to spend a few days working on his novel at the rundown country home Felix has inherited from his late father. Felix is ostensibly there to work on his proposal for an art diploma, but the lure of the coast and the sea and a few days holiday soon wins out, whilst Leon grumpily insists on trying to write.

Leon’s hapless mission is rendered even more unviable by the presence of the alluring Nadja, who Felix’s mother has, unbeknownst to him, allowed to stay in the main bedroom. Nadja is having vigorous sex with the local lifeguard, Devid, which can be heard through the thin walls and keeps Leon awake at night, so that he ends up sleeping outside with the mosquitos. The set-up suggests a holiday rom-com, albeit one which is disconcerted by the presence of the forest fires which glow on the nightly horizon, and the buzzing helicopters which dump water on the fire and echo the buzzing of the mosquitos. Leon is smitten by Nadja, but is too much of a self-obsessed oaf to do anything about it, even when he realises she might be interested in him. In the classic comedy situation, they would end up together, and this seems even more likely when Felix and Devid decide to embark on an unexpected fling.

I have been on a slight Petzold tip of late, watching both Undine and Phoenix on Mubi. Paula Beer appears to have replaced Nina Hoss as his muse, but the tone of the films remains the same: a sense of intellectual playfulness, anchored by a literary leitmotif - in this case a poem of Heine’s - married to a dispassionate take on the vicissitudes of love and human frailty. Roter Himmel and Undine, unburdened by the presence of too much history, offer unlikely character studies, with Leon in particular seeming like an almost Shakespearian anti-hero, an unwieldy Hamlet who will have to come to terms with his own flaws in order to overcome them and write the novel he needs to, rather than the one he doesn’t. The eco-message which lurks at the edges feels more like a footnote than a central axis of the film, constructing the possibility of tragedy in a world where affluence has rendered everything almost too comfortable (down to the Birkenstock Bostons which Leon sports). Where Barbara, Transit and Phoenix (which I have yet to watch) seek to wrestle with the implications of history on the German psyche, his later films appear to be addressing a more elemental agenda, where fire and water become protagonists. The resulting films have the feel of a short story by a nineteenth century master like Chekhov or Kleist, situating an ordinary soul, shaped and limited by the frailties of their society, in a situation where only tragedy or magic can give true meaning to their lives.