Fire of Love (2022)

PG, but I think that Disney+ labelled it as TV-14.  It's pretty innocent.  It's not very graphic.  We see some burns from being too close to a volcano, but even as gross as this is, it's pretty mild.  The big concern I have about watching this movie with children is the knowledge, from the beginning, that the Kraffts will die by volcano.  But most of it is pretty light, talking about a relationship built around volcanos.

DIRECTOR: Sara Dosa

​I had to pull teeth to get my family to watch this.  It was on Disney+ and it was up for an Academy Award and I thought, "Perfect.  I can get my kids into documentaries."  I assumed because my kids were really into Science Comics that this would be a natural extension.  And to a certain extent, I was successful.  Olivia ran upstairs and got her book on rocks and minerals.  But I don't know if my family necessarily has the attention span for something like this.  I don't know if it is a documentary thing or if it is borderline a nature documentary thing.  But Fire of Love is such a specific thing and, in this case, it means that it has a very specific audience.

At its heart and on its sleeve, it is a love story.  It sells itself on that premise. Maurice and Katia Krafft bonded over their love of vulcanology.  That's as unique as it gets.  I love this one line where they acknowledge that they basically have to be the only married vulcanologists on the planet.  It's not saying that vulcanologists don't get married.  They just don't get married to other vulcanologists.  And it's a nice story.  But there's a problem with documentaries to begin with, especially when it comes to love stories.  They either have to be the most unbelievable relationships ever or they are not enough to carry a story.  The story of Maurice and Katia is cute, but it isn't necessarily one wrought with twists and turns. Maurice is a bit of a thrillseeker.  Katia is more in awe of the majesty of nature.  Now, both of these personalities are drawn to volcanos.  Cool.  There's some conflict.  Maurice's fame coupled with his dumb ideas causes tension between the couple.  But we know from moment one that they have a pretty solid marriage.  Like all marriages, there are things that drive you crazy about each other.  But that's the nature of any relationship.  The onus on the film is to establish that those differences matter.  Really, they don't.

So National Geographic then leans heavily into the other element that they're good at.  I'm going to refer to this as the Planet Earth factor.  Fire of Love, thanks to the devoted documentation and filmmaking of the Kraffts, has a lot of really spectacular footage of volcanos.  Me, I'm not a big National Geographic guy.  I tend to want my documentaries to be either about music (I don't get it either) or about politics (I get that.  I'm fighting the world and want ammunition.) But straight up gorgeous footage of the world doing crazy stuff normally doesn't do it for me.  I'm going to dance around something for a while, so I apologize in advance.  But the gist of this is that while Fire of Love is effective in getting me to watch a lot of cool stuff blow up, it could be better.  Because the thing that kept me watching all this cool blowy-uppy stuff is that story of the Kraffts.  But as I mentioned before, that story is very thin.  Sure, the movie keeps it going for an hour-and-a-half.  But the story of the Kraffts is really about forty minutes tops.  Thank God that the movie decided to cop out at 1.5 hours because it started relying a bit too much on the film.

But there is one thing that really kept me going.  It's not surprising that, being the film snob I am, that I'm a big fan of Wes Anderson.  There's this back and forth between artist and inspiration with this movie.  Using The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as our foundational work, my wife and I couldn't help but make comparisons to that work.  The thing that I'm going to comment on that may seem a bit obvious is the notion that Wes Anderson had to be inspired by the Kraffts for Life Aquatic.  Geez, like it is on the nose. I just typed "Life Aquatic Fire of Love" into Google and I'm not the only one to jump on this train. It's everything.  The Kraffts, for as twee as it is to be romantic vulcanologists, define quirk.  They wear goofy colored hats.  They point at things and have the intense zoom on volcanos.  There are short shorts and everything is shot on Super 8.  (Okay, if I'm wrong about that, I apologize.  I'm mostly good at recognizing Super 8.) Trust me, thank goodness that the Kraffts were this way because I ship them so much harder for being Wes Anderson's template for everything. 

But there's something about Fire of Love, removed from the Kraffts' entire thing, that is also inspired by Anderson.  If Anderson was inspired by the Kraffts, Fire of Love was Inception-level inspired by Anderson. Most of that comes from Miranda July's flat affect delivery of narration.  Sure, the majority of the film is directly edited footage that the Kraffts used for films. But the transitions were basically made out of paper cuts outs and puppets.  I hate dealing in speculation, but the natural inclination for talking about volcanos and their affects on Earth would be impressive charts, graphs, and effects.  Instead, there's this intentional rudiment to everything that is presented on screen.  I can see this movie smoking a cigarette in a beanie, perhaps portrayed by Willem Dafoe.  It just embraces what it is.  It makes the movie somehow special to me.  I don't think that Wes Anderson would ever make a documentary (although I can be wrong; he did make animation), but this is what I imagine something from Anderson would look like.  It's almost fan service in the best way.  Sure, if you hate Wes Anderson, then I have nothing for you.  But this is almost a thought experiment on how something would look like.

The thing that I always have a hard time writing about when it comes to documentaries is about the subjects themselves though.  There's a weird personality behind the Kraffts that I find both incredibly romantic and incredibly frustrating at the same time.  I am going to preface this by saying, "Thank God they didn't have kids."  It does feel like the narrator is their kid, though, right?  I can't be the only one thinking that while watching this movie, can I?  Anyway, thank God they don't have kids because their life, for as joie-de-vivre as it is, also seems incredibly reckless.  Okay, there's the pursuit of science.  That part I get.  I don't get mad at astronauts, knowing that their rockets could blow up or absolutely anything could go wrong because what they do is done for the advancement of science.  The Kraffts are scientists.  Absolutely and I almost am about to undo my entire argument here, but they are scientists.  But it doesn't feel like a lot of this is for the pursuit of science.  It's almost thrill-seeking.  I suppose I can give Katia a pass because she's less than a thrill-seeker.  But Maurice is kind of selfish.  

There's this part that is probably going to stick with me.  At one point, Maurice and an associate figure out how to get a boat onto an acid lake.  It's horrifying.  There is this pretense of science that is put into it that quickly unravels when the line gets eaten by acid.  Then it just becomes this three hour trip to get back to land and free of the acid lake.  If Maurice learned his lesson there, I would write off the entire thing as cheeky.  It's because I want to be British and I'm writing, but cheeky is the word I'm going with.  But then Maurice won't stop talking about taking a boat down a lava flow.  Where is the science there?  How is the world becoming this better place?  I know that the Kraffts studying the most dangerous kinds of volcanos could save lives later and they may have saved lives later, but it feels like it is all part of the thrill-seeking, almost carnival attitude that Maurice is embracing with wanting to canoe down a lava flow.  Is there something more beautiful about the grey smoke volcanos than the ones that they approached previously?  It's oddly a death wish that ended up getting fulfilled?  Did they kind of want to go out in a blaze of glory?  I'm not saying that they were suicidal, but it seems like their deaths seemed somehow glory-seeking. I don't know.  Maybe because it's what I absolutely wouldn't do that I can't understand it.

It's a bummer that my family didn't really like the movie.  I think I might have enjoyed it alone a lot, but I do see the flaws of the movie through the people next to me.  It's like seeing a movie in the theater and the mood is infectious.  Regardless, worth my time.