Enno Trebs

Miroirs No. 3

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Laura looking thoughtful

Because it’s a Christian Petzold film, Miroirs No. 3 is an exercise in watching with the head tilted to one side. How’s he going to do it this time? “It” being either a remake of a familiar film, done with plausible deniability (the classic being Jerichow, an oblique take on The Postman Always Rings Twice). Or a fairy tale/myth reworked in modern dress, Petzold’s other obsession (see Undine or Afire). Is it either here? Or neither? The set-up is downright strange. A piano student is involved in a terrible car accident in which her boyfriend is killed. Instead of heading off to hospital, she moves in with the woman outside whose house the … Read more

Afire

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Leon lets the pages of his novel scatter in the wind

The films of Christian Petzold often feature a man thunderstruck by a woman, and so it is with Afire (Roter Himmel), the second of Petzold’s “elements” movies and the second to star Paula Beer as the focus of enchantment. In Undine Beer played a water sprite in human form, though Petzold never explicitly said so. Here she might be a fire sprite in human form. Petzold never tells us that either. But she’s dressed in red throughout, which possibly is a clue, and for the duration of the film, which plays out on the Baltic Coast, there is a fire is raging through the nearby forests and it threatens to engulf the holiday … Read more