Express At Berlinale: Christian Petzold’s Afire is both elemental and grounded

Two friends, Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix ( Langston Uibel), are heading towards the latter’s countryside house by the sea. Their journey has already been marred by a car breakdown, and when they arrive at the house, they find that they are not alone : another guest is already in residence, and has moved into the bigger room. This throws off Leon, who was hoping for solitude to go at his unfinished novel ; Felix, clearly more easy-going, is not bothered by any of it, not by the unexpected early occupant Nadja ( Paula Beer) having noisy sex next-door, nor by the sullenness that his pal wears like an armour, nor by the forest fires leaping redly into the sky.

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The sea is nearby, and both Felix and Nadja take off to the beach as often as they can, Not Leon, who glowers at his pages, waiting for his publisher to show up the following day. What if he thinks the novel is a stinker?

A grown up would be able to take critique in his stride, but Leon is a man-child, and Schubert does a great job of giving us a thin-skinned fellow who cannot bear the possibility of rejection. He’s also so self-absorbed that he is not interested in knowing anything about Nadja : he sees her behind an ice cream cart, and in his head he boxes her in as the-woman-who-sells-ice-cream. When he gets to know other facets about her, he reveals himself as that person who hates having to move past his assumptions : why didn’t she tell him that she is a literature major, working on a PhD? Her answer– because he didn’t ask– makes him even more mealy-mouthed.

There is growing up to be done, and Leon finally gets to the point where he can look beyond himself. This last act has a slightly hurried tragic curve thrown into it, but then when it leads to the emergence of Leon purged by the fire, the film moves towards a satisfactory closure.

Not all films leave you with the luxury of knowing that the characters that you’ve spent a couple of hours with, are hopefully going to be alright. Especially not if the film is ‘Limbo’, a moody black & white crime noir directed by Indigenous Australian filmmaker Ivan Sen. From the opening frame unease hangs heavy, as we see dour detective Travis Hurley ( Simon Baker) driving down an empty roads, about to reach a tiny outback town to re-open the case of an indigenous murdered woman twenty years ago.

The vivid, atmospheric ‘Limbo’, also in the Competition section, has stunning locations – the vast open desert, the sand-dunes, the caves where humans live and die, and an unmarked grave. Travis’s own motivations to uncover the crime, beyond the obvious professional one, are never made clear: is it just a job for him, or is there something more? The dead young woman had a complicated history, and it is something her still-alive, still-hurting siblings have never been able to talk about with the police, predominantly White.

We do get to know the perpetrator, or at least that’s what we think, but as to whether the survivors will get past their trauma, who knows?