Afire |link| -

Petzold subverts romantic comedy and melodrama conventions. The audience, primed by the setting and dynamics, expects Leon and Nadja to end up together. Instead, Nadja is genuinely attracted to the uncomplicated, physical Devid. Leon’s pining is pathetic, not poetic. The real “romance” of the film is Leon’s painful awakening to life itself – to the smells, tastes, and fragility of existence outside his head.

In religious texts, from the Burning Bush to Pentecostal tongues of fire, the divine often manifests as an unburnt flame. To be spiritually afire is to be purged of ego, to be illuminated by a truth that hurts as it heals. This is the fire of the ascetic, the monk, the mystic who stands ready to be consumed by the sublime. Petzold subverts romantic comedy and melodrama conventions