O que arde
Oliver Laxe (2019)
Although it doesn’t feel short as you watch, Fire Will Come runs only eighty-five minutes. The first six are devoted to images of the movement and collapse of trees in a forest. An hour into the film (available on Curzon Home Cinema), the promised conflagration of the title arrives. In the mountains of Galicia, a hamlet and the surrounding area burn – for more than ten screen minutes. No one is to be seen in the opening arboreal sequence. There are people battling the inferno but the viewer isn’t encouraged to regard them in a conventional way. You’re not concerned for the safety of the firefighters, who are upstaged by the visual power and beauty of a flaming night sky. The length of these two episodes, combined with their focus on landscape and destruction of the natural world, gives an idea of where the writer-director Oliver Laxe’s priorities lie.
This isn’t to say that human beings don’t matter in Fire Will Come (the apocalyptic flavour of the English title is absent from the Galician original, which translates literally as ‘that which burns’). The two principals, in particular, are compelling camera subjects throughout. But Laxe, whose third feature this is, and Santiago Fillol, who shares the screenplay credit with him, don’t trouble to explore the people in their story or pursue the suggestive thematic elements they give to it. In contrast, Laxe’s image-making is meticulously detailed, including his images of people and animals – the middle-aged protagonist Amador (Amador Arias Mon), his aged mother Benedicta (Benedicta Sánchez), her Alsatian dog, the three cows that Benedicta keeps on her smallholding in the mountains. Mauro Herce’s lighting is perhaps even more remarkable indoors than out. Shots of Amador and/or his mother sitting or eating in the kitchen of Benedicta’s home are like portrait paintings come to life. These shots are often held for some time so the compositions are nearly still life too.
In the tenebrous woodland of the opening section, a selva oscura if ever there was one, the trees’ motion is both disturbing and verging on comical – as they keel over, the trees look to be getting in each other’s way. The tone changes sharply once Laxe reveals that a bulldozer is bringing them down. He cuts from this opening to pairs of human hands handling a hefty dossier: the transition brought to mind the university I worked at and the rueful I-see-we’ve-destroyed-another-rainforest joke that committee members made ad nauseam about their bundles of papers. The one tree left standing at the end of the introduction is a eucalyptus, whose unique survival reinforces its sinister look. Later on, Amador describes this Australian immigrant to the region as ‘a plague … worse than the devil’. He’s unhappy too to discover that a local man called Inazio (Inazio Brao) is repairing tumbledown properties in the area with a view to attracting tourists. There’s a persistent implication that Fire Will Come has something to say on environmental damage, including (like Mark Jenkin’s Bait) gentrification. Yet Laxe persistently refuses to say it.
That dossier appears to be a set of case notes. As it passes from one pair of hands to another, voices on the soundtrack discuss Amador Coro. An alleged pyromaniac, he has served two years in jail for setting ‘the whole mountainside on fire’ and is now being released on parole. One of the voices, which presumably belong to police or parole officers, refers to Amador as a ‘poor bastard’: there’s a hint here that he may not be guilty of the crime for which he was convicted, that he could be an undeservedly marked man. He’s definitely a solitary one. After getting off the bus he catches after leaving prison, he sets out to walk to Benedicta’s smallholding, refusing a car-driver’s offer of a lift. (As he continues on his way, Amador Arias Mon’s lone/ly wolf gait is expressive.) Later, he turns down Inazio’s offer of work, choosing instead to help look after his mother’s cows. In spite of her remote habitation, Benedicta is more sociable than her son. We see her at the well-attended funeral of a neighbour. It’s she who suggests to Inazio that he offer Amador a job. When the vet Elena (Elena Fernández) calls to treat one of her cows, Benedicta urges Elena to stay for coffee.
The suggestion that Amador will be on the receiving end of give-a-dog-a-bad-name prejudice proves to be deceptive. Others in the vicinity see him as an oddball but there are no signs of ill will towards him – not until, that is, a sequence both pivotal and puzzling. This takes place in a bar in the town of Navia, where Amador drives one day. You assume this is to meet Elena. He first meets her when the cow that she later treats is stuck in water and Amador can’t single-handedly get the animal out. As they drive back in Elena’s jeep, Amador, for the first and only time in the film, nearly smiles, during a sparse, halting conversation about the Leonard Cohen song (‘Suzanne’) that Elena has playing. She also asks Amador if he ever goes to Navia and he says he sometimes does. He puts on his best clothes for his visit there but as he sits alone, watching other people in the bar, Amador looks even more bereft than usual. When Elena approaches, he says a glum hello and asks if people have told her about him. She says they have but ‘you know how people are’. Elena then asks how the cow’s doing and the scene ends. Oliver Laxe has been elliptical throughout but this sequence is something else. From the way it’s played, it’s hard to tell whether Amador and Elena had arranged to meet at all, let alone whether what Elena has now learned about Amador’s reputation and criminal record has changed her mind about spending time with him.
This is a turning point in the story, nevertheless. Back at the smallholding, Benedicta calls in vain for the Alsatian dog that wanted to follow Amador when he drove into Navia. (The animal is never seen again; there’s no indication of what happened to it.) As he drives homewards, Amador passes fire engines heading in the opposite direction, sirens blaring. He is then absent from the action throughout the night-long struggle to control the blaze. None of those fighting the fire voices suspicion as to who might be responsible – if anyone is: Laxe seems to leave open the possibility of a purely natural event in the intense summer heat. The following morning, there’s nothing to suggest that the police are investigating the fire. It’s left to Inazio, whose renovated cottages were destroyed in the blaze, to take the law into his own hands and beat up Amador. Inazio’s pals eventually persuade him to stop. Once the men have gone, Benedicta approaches and asks Amador if he’s OK. He silently gets to his feet. Mother and son walk off together. The film ends.
As might be guessed from the shared forenames of characters and those playing them, the cast are not professional actors. In a short but instructive Sight & Sound (April 2020) interview, Laxe gives the following answer to Jonathan Romney’s question about how he found his non-professionals:
‘Through auditions, mainly. Benedicta [Sánchez] emigrated to Brazil in her twenties, worked as a photographer, then came back. She’s 95 now, and basically a hermit. Inazio [Abrao] is a carpenter. Elena [Fernández] really is a vet. I always want to work with the person more than the character.’
That, at least, is clear from Fire Will Come. Laxe has assembled a collection of arresting faces and physiques, gets some fine naturalistic acting from his cast but shows no interest in penetrating appearance or behaviour. We never know if Amador is an eccentric eco-warrior, an antisocial scapegoat or someone else.
The fires in the film are real ones that raged in Galicia two consecutive summers. These are perennial acts of God rather than arson although, in the second year, after unprecedentedly heavy rainfall, Laxe and his crew had to wait a long time for them to start. I assume that Fire Will Come‘s most distressing sight, a skinny horse stumbling through a field in the aftermath of the fire that has left the creature burned and blind, was something the film-makers actually saw. The animals in evidence are sometimes as eloquent as the landscape. As Laxe also explains in his S&S interview:
‘I wanted to represent the ineffable. In that [opening] sequence, you have the forests and the machines, but there’s something else behind them – the machines aren’t just machines, the trees aren’t just trees. I wanted to make people feel that behind the world of exterior forms is another world of subtle forms. …’
Laxe realises the natural world with such skill and visual imagination that those first images, and some others, do have an almost animistic charge. It’s frustrating that his people remain opaque. This slow-moving film is often impressive but it’s more interesting to read and write about than it is to experience. Unlike another recent fire-themed enigma, Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, Fire Will Come is a mystery that’s less involving than exasperating.
10 April 2020
