‘The Red Sky’: Petzold shows with slight depth the adversity that arises from insecurities | Culture

Due to the setting, number of characters and themes, it looks like an Éric Rohmer film. However, with The red sky, latest film by the prestigious German director Christian Petzold, Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Berlin Film Festival, we must go further back. Even Anton Chekhov. To the light depth of it, to the deep lightness of it. To his ability to present captivating and elusive, peaceful and irritating characters, who show themselves in one way or another depending on the circumstances, always changing, which makes them adorable despite their flaws, because they are simply us.

This time the director of the notable films moves in these parameters Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014) y Ondine. Love forever (2020), which has been establishing itself for a decade and a half among the aristocracy of the most solid authors in Europe. As I already did in Phoenixwhich had echoes of Vertigo In the male character’s obstinacy to reconstruct the lost woman, the German filmmaker resorts in his final part to another mythical image from the history of cinema to round out his work: the embrace of the lovers of Pompeii, an essential symbol of the unparalleled I will Always Love You, by Roberto Rossellini. Of course, fused with “the thrill of love” in the Romanceby Heinrich Heine, considered the last poet of German romanticism, and who is explicitly cited with infinite beauty in one of the sequences.

For those who, after the previous paragraph, begin to think that this is not their film, that perhaps there is too much depth and complexity, don’t be afraid. The red sky, on the surface, is a bitter comedy about two young friends who want to spend a few days in the nice family home of one of them; a small paradise with a garden, in the middle of a wooded area and near the beach. Now, the tone is changing, and the writer who is trying to complete his second novel and the photographer who is preparing a portfolio to get into an art school gradually come across three more characters, a sweet and intelligent woman, a spontaneous rescuer and the writer’s editor, which ends up forming one of those vital, cultural and human microcosms so typical of Chekhov’s works. A closed but pleasant environment, bright on the outside but gloomy on the inside of one of its creatures: that increasingly unbearable writer, although touching as a pure fool, who only sees adversity around him and plots on the part of others, and who What it hides is a sea of ​​insecurities.

Without strange elements of cinematographic language or external artifices (invisible staging, conventional editing, no accompanying soundtrack except in a couple of minimal excerpts), Petzold achieves from the beginning that under the mantle of tranquility of the places where sets the story, becoming more and more literary as it progresses, but without ceasing to be good cinema, something perverse seems to hover over the characters. Of course, they are the increasingly out of control fires that stalk the area, and to which the title refers. But, in truth, it is something much harsher and less physical, always with the role of the writer as a reference. The red sky It is nothing more than always covering up our own inner shit by blaming others.

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