One of the great virtues of Rohmer’s cinema was that, often, the antipathy aroused by his characters was as devastating as it was moving. Imprisoned between self-deception and a certain moral superiority, they always had an excuse to cover up their insecurities, which slipped like grains of sand in a closed fist when their words began to fight with their actions. Angry with the world in an idyllic setting, the Leon (fantastic Thomas Schubert) from the extraordinary ‘The Red Sky’, with which Christian Petzold signs his greatest film, could have escaped from ‘The Nights of the Full Moon’, although His bilious vision of the world soon contrasts with the fresh, summery and stupefied gaze of those around him, and in this dialectical operation the character undresses, demonstrating how uncomfortable he is in his own skin. That process is crossed by a beautiful empathy, unprecedented in a filmmaker who until now had worked on his most inspired projects (‘Phoenix’, ‘Transit’) from a Brechtian distance, which here is diluted to reveal his talent for observational comedy, that which can explain the matter of affection from a meal in the countryside that takes place between glasses of wine and sharp retorts.
When ‘The Red Sky’ seems to have said everything about that writer who suffers from the second novel syndrome, revealing that art can only be honest if we respect each other in our vulnerability – and not, on the contrary, when it translates into tons of self-parodic meanness–, Petzold decides that his characters face something bigger than any everyday reality, putting the contagious lightness of the story in crisis to enter the burned forest of tragedy. No one can emerge from that final stretch unscathed: it seems that, at the end of the street, life, in its most secret, mysterious future, always wins the game over that fiction we call identity, which ends up reduced to a pile of ashes blown by the wind
For lovers of lightness with depth charges.
The best: its incisive look at the human condition and its unpredictable twist of the script.
Worst: that, after its success at the 2023 Berlinale, it took so long to be released.
Data sheet
Address: Christian Petzold Distribution: Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Ubiel, Enno Trebs Country: Germany Year: 2023 Release date: 6-14-2024 Gender: Drama Script: Christian Petzold Duration: 102 min.
Synopsis: Four young people who don’t know each other and who, for different reasons, share a summer house next to the beach. One is Leon, a conceited writer stuck on his latest work who goes on vacation with his friend of the opposite character, Felix. Devid, on her side, is the beach lifeguard and Nadja, who was already at the house when the others arrived, is a mysterious and elusive girl who goes up and down on her Rohmerian bicycle.
He writes and teaches about cinema as if there were no tomorrow. She saw “Carrie” at age six and is still applauding the prom scene, although as she matures she prefers to inhabit the benevolent, somnambulant states of Apichatpong cinema. She has the ability to compose books by typing with a single finger.
