Afire and Pola X: Sad Boys and their Desires

On feeling seen and thus embarrassed by Christian Petzold's latest film

Christian Petzold’s newest film, Afire, bothered me, got under my skin. I’ve been a quiet admirer of Christian Petzold for a few years now, never falling hard for him but respecting his unusual mix of utilitarian craft, historical big-themeness and emotional sensitivity. Petzold had at first seemed to me a politically-minded filmmaker who uses storytelling and the affective power of film to communicate the tragedies of history. Transit, for example, was an adaptation of a 1944 novel about people fleeing fascism, set in our present day, and it felt Prescient and Intelligent (with capital P’s and I’s). The State I am In, Yella, Barbara and Phoenix all involved interpersonal tragedies steeped in historically-informed circumstance. I thought: Petzold is a serious-minded political fabulist.

After seeing Petzold’s second most recent film, Undine, during the pandemic, I felt differently. I fell in love with both of its leads, Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer, two beguiling, singular screen presences. Undine was more about the ghosts of the heart than the ghosts of history, and I liked it. I felt like something must have shifted personally for Petzold. Was it the fading influence of Harun Farocki, Petzold’s late mentor and collaborator, a very Godard-influenced leftist political filmmaker? Or was it his finding new muses in Paula and Franz? Probably it was some private shift I’ll never know about. Whatever the case, Undine was the first of Petzold’s films to give me a real emotional walloping—and Afire hit me even harder.

Afire is a fable and a boy-meets-girl film. The main character, Leon, is a still-young novelist who wears black linen to adapt his melancholic writer uniform to the summer heat. Despite having accepted his friend Felix’s invitation to stay at his mother’s beachside cottage for a fun summer work retreat, Leon is all angst and spleen. He has written a manuscript for his second novel and dreads an impending meeting with his publisher. While Felix, a budding photographer, lives a sunny life of swimming, socializing, and the honest work of repairing a leak in the roof, Leon hutches in front of his laptop and stews over his manuscript.

Then Nadja enters the picture. Felix’s mother’s friend’s daughter, Nadja is a stranger and a surprise guest to the cottage. When they arrive, traces of Nadja’s presence litter the house. Leon is immediately discomfited. Before meeting her in person, Leon hears loud sex in the other bedroom and decides the woman involved must be doing it expressly to keep him from getting the sleep he needs to work on his manuscript. Leon hears Nadja before seeing her, and his outsized agitation is revealing—perhaps a woman’s pleasure is threatening to his angst, and perhaps he cannot objectify whom he cannot see. Sure enough, as soon as he lays eyes on her, Leon crushes hard on Nadja—it turns out that only the luminescent sighting of a beautiful woman can stir Leon from his ruminations.

While Nadja’s entry into the story catalyzes the ensuing drama, and a distant forest fire adds tension, Afire’s essential move is to follow Leon as he turns a potentially lovely Summer holiday into an existential crisis and forces everyone around him to participate in it.

Nadja falls into manic-pixie-dream-girl tropes—she wears pretty dresses, rides a cute bike, is generously kind to men. Throughout the first two thirds of Afire, Nadja is openhearted and willing, to a certain extent, to be projected upon. Although Leon reveals himself to be rude, snobbish and narcissistic, Nadja repeatedly shows Leon grace as they co-exist in the increasingly claustrophobic cottage. As this dynamic ramps up into a horrible comedy of manners, Petzold’s deft balance of cringe and intrigue keeps Afire floating in that precarious territory of humorous arthouse. But then I noticed something decidedly un-artsy was going on underneath the surface of the film. As I watched Leon’s leery foulness and Nadja’s receptive patience reach comic levels, the tropes of Hollywood teen movies began to circulate in my memory.

When we are first introduced to Nadja, I got an old Hollywood dopamine hit that immediately predicted the whole rest of the movie. In this turn to the personal, Petzold takes advantage of, or succumbs to, classic Male Gaze filmmaking—we first see a shot of Leon looking, then a long, full-body shot of a female figure walking, then his prolonged ogling gaze peeking from around a corner. No matter what he tells himself, we know he’s got a crush, a desire for the woman, and we, through the film grammar, are made to identify with his desire.

I’ve mostly understood the concept of the male gaze on a thematic level, but recently I watched Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power by Nina Menkes. In this documentary, Menkes spells out the visual syntax of the male gaze in such a basic, elemental way that concept solidifies into form: her argument is precise and hard to deny. She shows countless examples from major films throughout the whole history of cinema, demonstrating that certain of the most entrenched conventional building blocks of film grammar have supported the objectification of women since just about the beginning of mass-distributed moving images.

We all grew up on the grammar of men looking at women and it taught me how to desire as well. My first project in film school totally succumbed to the logic I believe I inherited—one of the first sequences in “Bags,” my three-minute silent student film, about the woes of carrying too-heavy groceries home, includes a sequence of a man looking, then a woman’s body, tacitly establishing his desire to know her and ultimately possess her. I certainly learned this sequential logic long before class had begun.

Paula Beer, who plays Nadja (as well as Undine) showed up alone to a Q&A at the Afire screening I attended. As one more or less must do in press tours, Paula convincingly sang Christian’s praises. However, one female audience member asked her how she could find, in her character, any fondness for a man as pathetic and unappealing as Leon. Paula Beer replied—I paraphrase—that her character wants to see the good in people, give them a chance. This answer, though well-acted, felt a bit defensive and laboured, like she had to find the love in her heart for Leon just as she possibly had to forgive Christian Petzold for ultimately casting her as a muse, or an object, and not a subject.

But Afire isn’t as cliché as all that. Petzold wants to dissolve the sadboy gazer in a vat of acid, as if to say: bro, it’s not working for you. Grow up. Leon falls apart as the characters around him reveal themselves to be three-dimensional: Nadja is not a bewitching, loud-sex-having interloper, but a thoughtful PHD student; her loud-sex-having lover is not just a small-town lifeguard but is helpful and kind, and also bisexual and fucking Felix as well, who until this reveal had been little more than Leon’s Friend-with-Cottage. Everyone is multi-dimensional and vibing and none of it makes sense to a conceited, insecure melancholic who cannot see anyone as a person but himself.

Petzold gives Leon grace through the gift of a second chance. Only after a string of woeful wakeup calls—Nadja and his publisher both say that his manuscript, titled Club Sandwich, is shit, Felix and his lover are burned alive in a forest fire, cremated like Pompeii lovers, and Leon learns way too late that his publisher has terminal cancer—does Leon obtain the humbling life experience and self-reflection to write a mature sophomore novel. As Leon’s publisher, doubling as the film’s narrator, reads Leon’s redemptive auto-fiction aloud in the cancer ward where Leon visits him, we understand that Leon has matured by experiencing tragedy and understanding his own boorish blindness throughout the ordeal.

Afire stirred my own residual sad boy feelings and felt hauntingly similar to a former favourite, which I don’t ever rewatch: Pola X, a film directed by Leos Carax and based on a novel by Herman Melville. Pola X is also about a young, blonde novelist who struggles to write his second book. Pierre (played by Gerard Depardieu’s son, Guillaume) is rich, handsome and wants to be an Important Writer. When he finds out that he may have a long-lost half-sister, Pierre tumbles into a gloomy identity crisis that ends with him living in an artist-terrorist-occupied warehouse, being in a throuple with his ex and his half-sister and finally blowing his aristocrat cousin’s brains out with two pistols. I found this movie so mesmerizing and so disturbing that when I tried to rewatch it, I had to stop halfway through.

Although they stew to different extremes, Pierre and Leon are melancholic cousins— they even look alike and dress similarly. Both films are about gloomy boys who want to be important artists and have a lot of trouble with beautiful women. But they diverge in fundamental ways. Unlike Leon, Guillaume doesn’t listen to his publisher, a genteel woman in her sixties who tells him, in the middle of his crisis, that maybe he’s just not that deep. Pierre is too lost in his feelings and cannot process the world around him. When his fiancé, whom he has left for his half-sister, ruins herself by insisting on entering into a love triangle with them in the warehouse, Pierre lets her. When Pierre’s manuscript is rejected as sophomoric, he takes his anger out on his cousin by killing him. Instead of reflecting on his decisions, Pierre goes harder into his self-indulgent spiral.

For Pierre, there is no denouement, no catharsis, no growth, only demise. Pierre never gains any insight into the futility of his quest for profundity or makes much of how he destroys the lives of those around him. The movie just ends with him going to jail. I get the sense that Leos Carax was not interested in learning or communicating Life Lessons from Heartbreak at the time of making Pola X. Carax’s career has been all about wallowing in one’s personal turmoil, rhapsodizing and making poetic images out of it. He does not seek insight. He does not seek wisdom. I think that this is why I experienced Pola X strongly, as a painful mirror of the experience of narcissistic depression, but cannot rewatch it and perhaps this is also why no one ever talks about the movie. It’s an abyss.

Whether convincingly or not, Afire aims to heal, to redeem or at least to close the container before Leon ruins his life. After having made confession in his now-approved second novel manuscript, Leon sees Nadja at the end of Afire and she looks back, meeting his gaze. Petzold suggests here that Nadja may forgive Leon for his shittiness and that perhaps there will be another chapter in their story.

There is a way that film teaches us how to look and behave. We follow the sequencing, we are guided by the director’s logic. A watched woman looking back speaks to the male desire of having his gaze received, his desire reciprocated. In acknowledging the reality of his loserhood by writing it out, Leon seems to have healed his wound and now jut might be able have a successful relationship. While Leos Carax only figures out that his male characters hurt the women they love in his most recent feature, Annette, in which a puppet girl must transform into a real girl to tell her (also imprisoned) father that he is bad for murdering her mother, Petzold offers the sad boy a way out before prison—it only took the immolation of his lovely cottage friend Felix.

Growth comes from pain; wisdom comes from suffering. What precisely does it take to snap a depressed man out of his fog? A woman’s smile? I suppose I took these two films to be different answers to a particular question: is being a sad boy a life sentence or just a nasty phase?