“And then sometimes I start lying.”
Christian Petzold becomes bored with his own voice during press junkets. “I want to tell new stories,” he confesses with a smile. “For example, I said in one interview that the next movie is about homosexual love or something like that. I’m not very professional sometimes.” I had asked him a straightforward, fact-checking question about whether his new film, Afire, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale, would be, as has been widely reported, the second film in a three- or four-film cycle loosely inspired by the elements: water, fire, earth, and sky. “Harun Farocki always said, ‘You know, nowadays, in arthouse cinema, they make movies like modern museums: just one fantastic building with no surroundings,’” he replied. “I love the film series of the ’40s and the ’50s. I love John Ford movies, with his stock company. I want to be part of a city and not to be in a lonely museum on the outskirts of town. And so I said Undine (2020) is the first movie of a trilogy. I must say, it’s a little bit of a lie.” Petzold is currently writing the script for his next film, tentatively titled Miroirs No.3, which will go into production in spring 2024. “I have no idea for the third part of this trilogy,” he claims. We’ll see.
A few weeks after premiered at the 2020 Berlinale, cinemas shut down, as did Petzold’s plan to adapt Georges Simenon’s 1946 novel , a pitch-black portrait of an amoral, murderous teenager in Nazi-occupied Brussels. While promoting in Paris, Petzold and the film’s star, Paula Beer, both contracted COVID, and so he passed the next month in bed, rewatching Visconti and Rohmer films, reading Chekhov and Richard Ford novels, and developing theories about summer movies. “My children were 22 and 24 years old, and everything was forbidden for them. They couldn’t go out, no clubs, no cinema, no cafeterias, nothing. And I thought, ‘My God, what is happening to our summers?’” He was struck by the contrast with his own youth, in the ’70s and ’80s, when his thoughts of the future weren’t clouded by pandemics or the existential threat of climate catastrophe. Revisiting Rohmer reminded him of the French tradition of summer movies: teenagers on the beach, with no supervision and little to do. Discovering David Robert Mitchell’s (2010) and (2014) reminded him of the American tradition: a car, two half-naked girls, two boys with beer and tattoos, and a cabin in the woods. Petzold regretted that Germany had no such tradition. “And then I this genre before the fascists won their first election: (1930) by Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and Edgar G. Ulmer. One day, summer, Berlin, young people, a lake, love, alcohol, dancing—it’s utopia. The world is open to you, like a summer night’s dream.”
