Afire (2023, Christian Petzold) (Patreon)

44/100

Oh, how I hated every second in Leon's company. We're not meant to admire the guy, of course, but there's something singularly off-putting and (to me) deeply uninteresting about this dude's particular variety of extreme social dysfunction. Comparing Afire to, say, The Forest for the Trees would be unfair; for all that Ade's film makes me cringe, it's a portrait of someone who's trying way too hard, which inspires protective empathy unavailable to a character who rejects every friendly gesture. Roger Greenberg's more in the ballpark (and Greenberg happens to be one of the two Baumbach films I actively dislike*), but I'll take his hair-trigger hostility—which is at least meant to be funny, even if I don't laugh much—over Leon's sullen, impassive anhedonia. While there's no doubt in my mind that Thomas Schubert gives exactly the maddening, dislikable performance that Petzold wanted, I heaved a sigh of temporary but blissful relief every single time he exited frame (not often). For those who don't experience this allergic reaction, Afire will likely seem acutely insightful, and perhaps even sort of amusing, in its way; my only semi-objective criticism involves Petzold's blunt use of wildfire as controlling metaphor, and even that can be justified by the whole literary angle (which ultimately suggests—if I understand the ending correctly, and I'm by no means confident that I do; can't find any discussion as yet—that most of what we see probably didn't happen, or at least didn't happen remotely as we see it). If, like me, you find it hard to buy that Félix would tolerate Leon as a friend for more than 45 seconds, or that a woman as vivacious and apparently together as Nadja would keep trying to penetrate his self-absorbed shell, or that a person this subtly unpleasant actually exists, no as-tweaked-for-his-novel conceit can retroactively ease your suffering. This is almost certainly a "good" film, but get it the fuck away from me in my opinion. 

* While We're Young. Haven't seen Highball, which I know he's disowned.