German director Christian Petzold’s tenth feature film, Afire—which premiered this year in Berlin and has now arrived in American theaters—dramatizes with understated intelligence the kind of psycho-social tension that, in the age of pandemics and climate emergency, we seem doomed to face, forget, and face again. In some ways a minor work—it has a short running-time, a cast you can count on one hand, and an almost too-simple plotline—Afire nevertheless marks a new level of ambition and achievement for Petzold. It is a chamber piece centered on youthful preoccupations against a backdrop of profound but easily ignored risks, a critique of bourgeois self-obsession that remains grounded in personal predicaments. Its simplicity and even-handedness are the result of decades of steadily increasing technical mastery and thematic clarity.
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