Afire

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 ā€œelementsā€ 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 sheā€™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

Undine

Jacob Matschenz and Paule Beer in a swimming pool

So, an Undine. Itā€™s a mythical water nymph, mentioned by Paracelsus, the Renaissance physician, but you wonā€™t learn that directly from Christian Petzoldā€™s latest drama, an increasingly bizarre and dislocated story of love suffused with magical realist moments that make no sense at allā€¦ unless you realise that the titular Undine (Paula Beer) is a version of the mythical creature who fell in love with a human. This Undine is a pencil-skirted guide to historical Berlin. She’s fresh out of a relationship with a guy she thought was the one, now propelled by fate into another one when a fish tank explodes and she and a man sheā€™s just met (Franz Rogowski) are … Read more