Director: Christian Petzold (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
The middle of nowhere, or Eastern Germany as it’s sometimes known. Leon is dozing in the passenger seat while Felix is driving through the woods. When something blows up in the car engine (they’re none the wiser and I’m certainly not), they pick up their bags and walk. It’s 10km to the nearest village, and then a further 2km, but Felix knows a short cut through the woods. As they get increasingly lost, the sky darkens and the air fills with the sound of wild animals.
This ordeal clearly brings out the differences between the two young men. Felix is happy-go-lucky and adventurous. If they get lost, well, things will sort themselves out eventually. He tells Leon to wait with the luggage while he goes on a reccie. Leon, meanwhile, is surly and curmudgeonly. He never wastes an opportunity to moan, and, although Felix seems to be carrying most of their stuff, it is Leon who makes out as if he’s having to do all the heavy work.
When they arrive – at a holiday cottage owned by Felix’s parents – the washing machine is running and the light is on on the record player. Felix rings his mum to find out what’s happened, and she tells him that she’s told the niece of one of her workmates that she can stay. Felix says “no problem”, and says that they’ll share the smaller room. Leon’s face drops at the words “share” and “smaller” and moans that he’s got lots of work to do and needs his space.
The workmate’s niece is called Nadja, so Felix and Leon presume that she must be Russian. They hear her before they meet her – the walls are paper thin and she has a regular gentleman caller. This gets too much for Leon, who goes to sleep outside, even though it means having chunks of him being bitten by mosquitoes. When he wakes up he’s even more surly than usual, and when Nadja appears offering morning coffee, he emits a string of invective.
Nadja is pretty and smiley, and – guess what? – not Russian. Leon is immediately smitten but unable to say anything to her which shows him in a good light. If you just showed the clips of Leon saying “shit” to himself and rolling his eyes, you’d get about half the film. When they go to the beach, Leon recognises the life guard as the man he saw leaving Nadja’s room naked. Felix, good-natured as ever, starts chatting to his friend’s new nemesis, and invites him over for dinner.
This is one of the few occasions when Leon gets as far as the beach. Usually he’s busy with his work – the manuscript of his second novel, with which he is very dissatisfied. While the others go and have fun, Leon spends his day with displacement activities – throwing a tennis ball against the wall, playing records, sorting the papers of his manuscript – anything but actually get any work done. When Felix returns and asks him to help fix a leak on the roof, Leon says he is way too busy.
Meanwhile, Felix has work of his own to sort out, but gets things done much more nonchalantly. He’s applying for a photography course at the Universität der Kunst, and needs to get a portfolio together. He has this idea of photographing people from behind when they’re staring at the sea, and then taking pictures of them from the front. Leon has all sorts of intellectual arguments why this is a very bad idea, but the pictures look good, and at least Felix is getting something done.
When the lifeguard – Devid (with an e – an East German thing, he says), comes for dinner, he sets out with an elaborate anecdote about a past affair. While Felix and Nadja laugh and engage with what Devid is saying, Leon just sits back and seethes. You sense that he is partly jealous of Devid’s stories about actual relationships with actual women, but also of the mere life guard’s ability to tell a story in a way in which he, the professional story teller, is unable to emulate.
I found it difficult to feel much affection for director Christian Petzold’s two previous films – Transit and Undine, films which showed off their literary knowledge, but felt too cold and deliberately obscure. Compared to them, Roter Himmel is much more fun (although it wilfully shows its knowledge of both Heinrich Heine and the East German write Uwe Johnson, to the extent that Leon mocks the East Germans for their regular mispronunciation of Johnson’s surname).
Indeed, Leon is such a pretentious, self-righteous character that Roter Himmel is taking a gamble by showing most of the action from his perspective. He is so full of himself and confident of his own artistic ability, that he could almost be the writer of Transit and Undine. When he learns that Nadja is not just an ice cream seller and has an academic history, he just can’t cope. Full credit for making Petzold’s on screen representative so thoroughly objectionable.
But slowly, Leon’s self-belief is undermined. He gives Nadja a copy of his novel to read, and then is devastated to hear that she things it’s the worst sort of pretentious crap (we can start with the name – Club Sandwich). Leon’s publisher comes to call, but he can’t stay anywhere near as long as Felix wants, and his copy of the manuscript is full of crossings out showing which passages need to be cut. He shows more interest in the potential of Felix and Nadja than in his client.
Roter Himmel is well acted and it’s interesting enough, but I did sometimes wonder what was really the point of it all. Not to the extent that I did with Undine, which just came over to me as someone trying too desperately to show his credibility. At least Roter Himmel has plot and character development. But there were still too many “symbolic” parts for me (like the burning sky) that were too underwritten to really mean anything. Still, a step forward – for me at least.
CinePhil 