2023-04-20 14:06:42
JEvery great director, it is said, creates his own world. And this world is recognizable at first glance. With Fellini, all people and things have something that dances, so that everything that happens seems to float a few millimeters above the ground. With Steven Spielberg, the story gets sentimental every twenty minutes. You can recognize a film by Ingmar Bergman by the fact that the mood darkens as soon as a man and a woman (or two men and two women) meet. And with Martin Scorsese, the scenes are cut the way Scorsese talks: rapid, razor-sharp, with no respite.
But how do you actually know that you are sitting in a film by Christian Petzold? Maybe it’s because nothing particularly exciting is happening at first glance – and neither is it at second glance. Still. The characters are often on the move at the beginning, in the car or on the train. In “Red Sky”, for example: two young men in a Mercedes on a country road. “Something’s wrong,” says one, and the other replies: “I can’t hear anything.” But then the car stops, the two have to continue on foot, and suddenly Leon (Thomas Schubert) is alone in the forest. It’s dusk, wild boars grunt, then a plane roars low over the treetops and Leon almost panics. But only almost.
Immediately afterwards everything is fine again, the holidays on the Baltic Sea can begin – except that they are working holidays. Because Leon is writing a novel, his second, which he wants to finish here, and he has a bad feeling about it. This increases his irritability when there are minor disturbances, which soon arise because Leon and his friend Felix have to share Felix’s mother’s holiday home with a couple whose love moans penetrate the wall of the room late at night and drive the annoyed author outside. It’s quiet there. Only the mosquitoes buzz.
And then there is this woman. Wearing a red patterned dress with shoulder-length red hair, she makes coffee and hangs out the laundry, and Leon watches her every move. Her name is Nadja, and when she invites Leon to go to the sea with her, he declines, although he actually wants to go. That’s how he feeds his frustration.
A flickering, flickering glow
But Nadja’s dress is not the only red in this film. Further west, one hears that the forests are burning, the freeway and several roads are already closed, and bookings are being canceled in the beach hotels. True, as Felix says, the fire is thirty kilometers away and the wind is blowing inland, so there is no danger. But then the wind changes and one night, on the fourth day, the guests of the holiday home – Devid, the fourth, is a lifeguard on the beach – see what’s coming from the roof. The horizon glows like a sunset. But it is a flickering, flickering glow, the reflection of a pyre. The sky is blazing.
There is no need to ask where Christian Petzold got the idea for this story: it was in the air. The question is rather how Petzold manages to weave the catastrophe that “Red Sky” already has in the title so casually into the story that you only notice it when it has almost caught up with the characters. In an American film, the fire would have been there right at the beginning, in the opening credits, and in a French one, it would have brought the hero and heroine together at the end, as a catalyst for love.
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