2023-04-19 14:37:39
IIn older announcements it is still in there: Christian Petzold is shooting his new film “Red Sky” with Paula Beer and Jonas Dassler. That turned out to be premature, as Beer and Dassler were no longer together when filming was set to begin. A cast problem resulting from a relationship state. “Red Heaven” is all about relationships.
There are the friends Leon and Felix, on their way to a couple of creative weeks in Felix’s family’s summer house on the Darß. Leon wants to continue writing his second book before the publisher comes to give an opinion. Felix wants to take photos for an application folder. When they arrive at the house in the forest, they already find a guest, the ice cream seller Nadja, who ended up there through Felix’s mother. And then there is the lifeguard Devid, who is with Nadja, as the newcomers can hear well at night through the thin walls.
Four young people, summer, sun, sea: That sounds like the feathery comedies of Eric Rohmer, who shot a tetralogy of “Tales of the Four Seasons” in the 90s; Petzold planned a trilogy of elements – first water (“Undine”), then fire (“Red Sky”), then earth & air – but backed away from it. His French co-producer gave him a slipcase containing all the great Rohmer’s films, so it’s safe to look for traces of the model in “Red Sky”, although at first glance it seems absurd, the playful French and the strict German.
A small revolution
Summer holidays in Germany serve to bring it to a head, above all to restore performance. In France you’re out for two months, lying on the beach, lazing around, chatting, eating, drinking, flirting (I hope it’s still like that). The bottom line is being unproductive. For the first time in Petzold there are three characters who indulge in such idleness, Felix, Nadja and Devid. The fourth remains “German” and cannot relax. “The work doesn’t allow it,” Leon defends when the others try to lure him to the beach. Not even when Nadja asks him to watch the bioluminescent sea with her at night does he give in.
Four main characters: This means a small revolution in the Petzold universe, which was previously populated by lonely characters: the doctor “Barbara”, the venture capitalist “Yella”, the historian “Undine”. There was a family, 20 years ago in “Internal Security”, a terrorist couple with a child fleeing state power, but this family was broken up, only the daughter survived, and since then Petzold seemed to have mostly had traumatized women.
Beer and Petzold at the Berlinale
Those: REUTERS/Michele Tantussi
Nadja (Paula Beer) is not traumatized, and she has a certain ambition to make loafing palatable to the grouch. This is proving to be difficult, which may be due to the fact that people are raw materials for writers, with whom one observes but does not get involved – but also because Leon has secretly cast a glance at Nadja, but does not dare. Thomas Schubert is the new Jonas Dassler, and we don’t know how Dassler would have played Leon, but Schubert is wonderful as a badass with writer’s block; The story is told from his perspective. Left alone, he maniacally tosses a tennis ball against a wall, like Jack Nicholson typing the same sentence over and over again in The Shining.
“Red Sky” is also a film of one-sided, non-binding, covert relationships and therefore quite Rohmer – but Petzold wouldn’t be the German he is if the non-binding didn’t become threatening. Once, at the dinner table, Nadja recites the poem “Der Asra” about the same tribe and its children, “who die when they love”. It comes from Heinrich Heine, this Franco-German son of two, perfector and conqueror of romanticism. Petzold’s envisaged trilogy was in the Romantic tradition, and one can always discover its motifs in his films: the unconscious, the deep forest, the lonely house.
Ominous signs of heaven: (from left) Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel and Enno Trebs
Source: Christian Schulz, Schramm Film
“Red Sky” – winner of the Silver Berlinale Bear – seems as if Petzold is playing through these motifs again – only to say goodbye to them radically. He keeps the picturesque from us to a large extent – the artists’ village of Ahrenshoop, the majestic sea – and when he records a song by the Austrian group Wallners, that’s a warning sign: “Love’s gonna make us blind”..
The four in the house are blind to their feelings, the signs of disaster are increasing outside the doors: Petzold lets his characters run into the apocalypse. Nature is no longer sublime, as the romantics sang to us. The sky over the Darß is not red for nothing.
#Petzolds #film #Red #Sky #work #doesnt