Movie review | The award-winning German film portrays bohemian young adults with cruelty and love

Red Sky (Roter Himmel), directed by Christian Petzold. 102 min. K12. ★★★★

Wonderful the sea hisses and churns, the flies mourn in abundance. The old house is full of sex, which a charming young woman has at night behind the wall. The bored first-time writer almost hums with disdain for everything that blooms, enjoys and dares around him.

German by Christian Petzold Red sky plays with the self-centeredness of a young artist juxtaposed with the truly unmanageable scale of life: forest fire, illness and death. Leon, who was successful with his first book (Thomas Schubert) arrives with his friend at the summer villa to write and blames everyone else, except himself, for his creative predicament. Naive, free and hedonistic, my photographer friend Felix (Langston Uibel) like Nadja, who is already staying at the villa (Paula Beer) and lifeguard Adonis Devid (Enno Trebs).

A taxing and reluctant point of view is a risky narrative choice. That’s why it’s worth doing it to the fullest. Leon’s self-loathing shapes the pictures in places like a stomach-turner: with him, you drift from one place to another and stare at life from a distance, bitterly, from behind the bend. Leon’s clumsy figure sits, lies and stands in the pictures like an obstacle without which everything would be more fluid. The path to identification is through frustration – an equally intimate feeling – rather than straightforward compassion.

Christian Petzold is one of the central directors of contemporary German cinema and the so-called Berlin School. The informal school is characterized by the lack of gestures in the films, the irony of human relationships and a sharp look at the intimate friction points or hypocrisies of everyday life. The intersections with French New Wave cinema are obvious. Bourgeois angst, sexiness and wit mix greedily and tightly, even if the world around turns into a reindeer.

Awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival Red sky takes its thematic contrasts quite literally. Around the idyllic summer villa, the forest really burns, and the wild animals shrivel alive while the poet is quoted at the dinner table Heinrich Heine or consider looking at the sea as the subject of a portrait of Aktia. Artificial importance and its human sensitivity exist at the same time.

Petzold is skilled at describing silent hierarchies and power games between people, which also The red sky dialogue scenes review. All of the characters have power over each other, which is depicted through repetition, looks and word choices. The feeling of dimness arises from the continuation of the space all the way outside the picture as voices and disappearing persons, receding backs.

The film’s spoken-word foreshadowing is by Éric Rohmer in the young, idle intellectuals of the movies, who, in the stagnation of summer, went about their lives without succeeding in fulfilling their wishes. The red sky however, brings to the present day the burning forest of the film’s milieu, which is more the reality of the climate crisis than a metaphor.

Written by Christian Petzold, starring Thomas Schubert, Paula Beer, Langston Uibel.