​This article contains spoilers for Afire and Cobweb.

There’s a pseudo-genre of movie that could be called the summer vacation movie. French directors, living in a country where people spend a sixth of their year vacationing, have made such movies, as have Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini. And we can’t forget Japanese summer holiday movies like Kikujiro and Arrietty. Famed German director Christian Petzold brings us Afire, a movie that openly plants itself within the genre. Petzold is a great storyteller, and he described how the great Éric Rohmer’s company Les Films du Losange, the distributor of Petzold’s 2020 film Undine, gifted him and the film’s star, Paula Beer, Blu-ray box sets of Rohmer’s works while they were in Paris promoting the movie. Petzold, who caught COVID-19 from his interpreter during that time, says he watched the Blu-rays while under quarantine and asked himself why Germany is alone in not having summer vacation films. From there, he changed his then work in progress, which was about a fire, to be set during a vacation, and thus Afire was born. Come to think of it, a lot of movies have been made under the influence of a similar kind of determination.

Before entering art school, Felix (Langston Uibel) summers at his mother’s vacation home in a forest by the Baltic Sea with his friend Leon (Thomas Schubert). And though news of a massive forest fire spreads, they don’t pay it much mind as the winds are pushing it away from them. Each has an idea of what they’ll do during the trip: Leon, on the heels of the success of his debut novel, will complete the manuscript for his follow-up, Club Sandwich; Felix, meanwhile, will complete his entrance portfolio for school. But there are hints all around the forest home that a woman named Nadja (Paula Beer) has been occupying the place when two friends barely made it in after their car broke down. Leon sees the dirty dishes and clothes strewn about and frowns. Watching the two friends try to figure out who else has been in the messy house is less like a French vacation movie and more like the grotesque German fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.” If it were an American summer flick, this is where the serial killer would show up; instead, the forest fire slowly makes its way toward the house. When Leon first lays eyes on Nadja, he wears an expression of contempt, but it masks the glances he makes toward her with budding desire. The lively and honest Nadja, meanwhile, is his complete opposite.

Petzold’s more recent works have been thrillers and melodramas that fuse terrifying Western history with archetypes from myth, but Afire follows the small tragedy of real-life people who have lost the ability of finding love or happiness.  It looks particularly close into how that loss affects artists in particular. Petzold’s weapon of choice when it comes to conveying his story is (subtle) repetition of imagery and sounds. Leon tries to give off an artistic vibe by distancing himself from others, gazing out at the scenery every day from the same spot at the window or in the garden, his reverie only broken by the sound of a fire fighter helicopter in the sky. This part of Leon’s character is what makes the bulk of Afire before flames engulf the forest a bitter comedy. The young artist is at once insecure yet full of arrogance. Unlike his friends, who give themselves to the surf and sun, cook, and work part-time jobs in search of inspiration, Leon dedicates his time to his writing, which he sees as a noble labour that must not be obstructed. In fact, he sees basically anything else as a chore. He’s annoyed by the idea of putting in time for insignificant pursuits like shopping at the market, taking a swim, or fixing the roof, all of which serve only to get in the way of his writing. Unsurprisingly, he fails to notice the world around him. He doesn’t notice someone falling in love or falling seriously ill even when it happens right in front of his eye. He sees the other three as hypocritical for enjoying their lives freely, and expresses this from time to time as verbal attacks. And for Leon, whose identity as an author is what holds him together, the fact that the others turn out to be great storytellers and literary scholars represents a lethal blow to that sense of self.

In the end, though, the core of Afire isn’t a manner comedy about a self-indulgent budding artists. Leon’s headspace can also be read as the dilemma that all artists face. Leon is constantly reminding others that he needs to be working on his manuscript, turning down all social offers under the pretext that he needs to write, but once alone, he does nothing but toss a ball against the wall. He’s a cursed spectator, in a sense: He’s more focused on the idea of being a writer than actually doing to work to be one, paying more attention to the way he views himself than to observing others living life and writing for real. Like a director who can’t get a proper grasp on the world without putting it within the confines of the film’s frame, maybe Leon, too, is the kind of person who feels the author should always be on the outside looking in, only able to truly understand the big picture when they are removed from what’s happening.

Just when the audience might wonder what would help Leon to break out of this ironclad defense mechanism and finally write that quality novel, the trigger comes at last from outside him when the wildfire comes down upon them all. The young protagonists are strangely indifferent to the fire until it’s too late—maybe because, as one of the generations not directly responsible for the environmental crisis, they have no lessons to learn from it. Petzold has said that the titular event in Afire isn’t a symbol but instead the tragic reality faced throughout Europe in places like Turkey, Italy, and Germany. Or it might be just that we are living in a age symbols and realities have converged. Fire! When the sky fills with ashes, the movie’s tone, its characters, and its sense of time are thrown into chaos all at once. In a surprising twist for a summer vacation film, the audience has to witness the sudden, gruesome death. Petzold feels that movies under this genre of today can’t be the same as their predecessors from the 1980s and ’90s. Afire seems to grieve, in its dry way, the fact that the end is near and today’s youth simply doesn’t have many summers left in which to experience love, loss, or growth.

As a film about artists, Afire is a more complex allegory than at first glance. Does the fire jolt Leon into experiencing personal growth? Given the scene where he meets an editor sometime after that summer, the film hints at the idea that everything that happens on-screen could be a novel written by Leon himself in memory of the incidents that took place. The film even gives hope that Leon and Nadja may have fallen in love, when they’re reunited and Nadja’s wearing plain clothes, as opposed to the red dress she has on earlier. Thinking back on the movie, there seems to be a lot of importance to the scene where Leon avoids the shock that should come with finding his friend’s body after the fire by drawing parallels to the human remains discovered at the ruins of Pompeii—a reaction that disappoints Nadja. In that sense, what finally awakened Leon may not have been the fire and the death around him, but rather the failure of his love life. Whatever the true trigger is, Afire lends itself to two different interpretations. It may be that loss is what finally led to Leon developing into a more fully fledged novelist. And while that’s a positive development, it’s tough to accept the idea that a single event can fundamentally alter an artist and their work like that. Could it be that Leon has been trapped within perpetually repeating pattern of embellishing his own tragedy for the sake of his fiction, writing a novel with a similar stance to Club Sandwich where he acts as an observer to, not participant in, his own painful experiences? The first time I watched the film, I came to the conclusion that Petzold’s main message is the former; the second time I watched, I saw the latter. Afire truly is scathing in a way that sneaks up on you.

There was another movie about artists out in September that starts and ends with a fire, and that’s Kim Jee-woon’s Cobweb. The film takes place in 1970s South Korea, when the Park Chung Hee dictatorship’s censorship at the screenplay stage had a major stranglehold on freedom of expression. In the movie, fictional director Kim Yeol (Song Kang-ho) found success with his debut film, A Love Like Fire, but he hasn’t found any success with his follow-ups, and so people begin to suspect that his first movie was actually lifted from another director—and Kim’s mentor during his time as an assistant director—Shin Sang-ho. Shin died while filming a scene with a fire, giving up his life just so he wouldn’t lose out on the footage.

Kim is crunched between two worries: his talent coming under question, and the torment of others judging him. He becomes obsessed with the idea of reshooting, the ending of Cobweb, his latest movie, fully convinced he can salvage the work and turn it into a masterpiece. He thus calls back the actors and crew who have all already moved onto new horizons, and despite opposition, goes all in on two days of reshoots, during which he strives to accomplish two things: In terms of narrative, it will transform the once obedient and self-sacrificing female characters into subjects of desire; the format will also change to be one long take—in French, a plan-séquence—with the ambitious inclusion of a fire.

Everyone from the executives and crew to the actors rails against their director’s unreasonable requests, but once the camera starts rolling, they all put their hearts into their work. Thanks to a combination of unpredictable coincidences and the pathos that spills over from the real world of the film we watch and into the film-within-a-film, the new scenes—filmed without the director fully expressing his vision to the others—not homogeneous in a fascinating way. All art is essentially a fight against the uncertain, but that doesn’t always have to mean being in control. And, as a collectively created artform, if a movie is unable to learn from and make use of the unexpected things that come up spontaneously during a scene, it can be considered to be a failure.

The drama of Cobweb takes place within the confines of a small space and a short timeframe, but it’s not one where the camera makes acrobatic movements or where careful attention had to be paid to the way it moved around while filming, unlike others like Welcome Back, Mr. McDonald or ONE CUT OF THE DEAD. The heart of Cobweb is in the way its ragtag mix of characters come together under unpleasant circumstances to create something good if slightly off, as well as its message of comfort and support to others in the industry. The characters in the black-and-white film-with-a-film are caught in a web of desires and in a way devoured, but the characters in the real director’s film all receive their own kind of rewards when they leave the set. Compared to the fictional Kim’s ambitions for the long take, the final product of the shot is impressive neither in narrative nor in format. It’s only when we watch that sequence carefully that we realize the important thing for the director isn’t what the camera captures during the reshoots but the very act of attempting to execute his artistic vision under nearly impossible circumstances.
 

Korean film buffs will detect traces of directors Kim Ki-young’s and Lee Man Hee’s works in the film, but more than anything, Cobweb holds a mirror up to the many successes and failures that Kim Ji-woon has tasted in a wide swath of genres and media. His previous works suggest he’s the type to invent sophisticated images, plant them inside his films, and drive the story toward revealing them. He's also shown himself to be a grim storyteller where a single brush with fate or one tiny deviation can change the outcome of everything, as with a flash of rage in A Tale of Two Sisters, passing affection in A Bittersweet Life, or a lonely drink in The Age of Shadows. But Cobweb leaves a different impression. It foregrounds the energy that the ensemble cast brings with it, zooming out so that the egos of the real and fictional Kims are just another part of that. The fire—at first coming across as a significant symbol of original sin and salvation—ultimately comes across as just another happening in the process.