It was announced a few hours ago that Sara Dosa‘s Fire of Love (Neon/National Geographic) has won the North Carolina Film Critics Association award for 2022’s Best Documentary. The same award was handed out last month by the Chicago Film Critics Association. I respect Dosa’s film as far as it went, but it’s not as good as all that. Here’s my 7.13.22 review:
“Fire of Love tells the story of devoted (one could say obsessive) volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died in a volcanic explosion atop Japan’s Mount Unzen on 6.3.91 — 31 years ago.
“The married couple — French natives, deep soulmates — had been studying, cataloguing, filming and photo-snapping volcanic eruptions since the early ’70s, and were among the most fearless and exacting in their field.
“Dosa’s 93-minute doc is mostly composed of volcano footage (color, 16mm) that the Kraffts shot over the years, and which apparently was only made accessible to Dosa and her producers somewhat recently. The film also contains a fair amount of footage of the Kraffts themselves.
“The dynamic visuals (miles-high clouds of gray ash, thunderous rumbling, pools of intense red-gold lava bubbling over and streaming down mountainsides) are exciting or at least fascinating until they become familiar, at which point you’re left with ‘okay, here are some more lava flows’ and ‘wow, more shots of nuclear blast ash clouds.’
“The problem, for me, is Dosa’s decision to weave it all together with Miranda July‘s whispering, barely enunciated narration. I was on the verge of abandoning the doc because of this aspect. July sounds like a parent quietly reading a Babar the Elephant story to a small child at bedtime.
“The idea, presumably, is to pass along a certain romantic sensibility as well as (I gathered) soft-spoken Katia’s view of volcano worship, marriage, the twists and turns of nature…the whole magilla. But if ever a narration track rubbed me the wrong way, it was this one.
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“The honest truth is that I found Fire of Love a tad boring at first. If the Kraffts hadn’t been killed there would be no film, just as Werner Herzog‘s Grizzly Man wouldn’t have been a film if Timothy Treadwell hadn’t been eaten by a bear.
“Herzog’s Into The Inferno (’16) covers roughly the same ground as Fire of Love, and I for one found it a bit more intriguing than Dosa’s decent–enough film.
“Why were the Kraffts so into volcanoes? ‘Both Katia and I got into volcanology because we were disappointed in humanity,’ Maurice said. ‘Since a volcano is greater than man, we felt this is what we need. Something beyond human understanding.’
“But were they really seeking a mystical communion with the primal forces of nature? Or were the Kraffts simply volcano junkies in the same way that some photojournalists obsessively cover war zones, and Joanne and Bill Harding (Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton) were tornado junkies in Twister?
“The Kraffts were doing valuable work, but they were primarily, it seems to me, moths lured by flame. Was their story a replay of the ancient myth of Icarus? You could certainly start with that interpretation.
“The Kraffts were killed not by lava but a pyroclastic cloud — a fast-moving current of boiling hot gas and volcanic matter that flows along the ground away from a volcano at average speeds of 100 kph but sometimes as fast as 700 kph. They and American volcanologist Harry Glicken were standing on a ridge near the volcano and suddenly the cloud surged up and over and killed them ‘instantly.’
“I found it odd that Dosa’s doc doesn’t mention that 43 people were killed that day by the same tragic event — the Kraffts, Glicken and 40 journalists. Wouldn’t the deaths of so many people in the same area warrant an explanation of what happened? Dosa barely gets into the specifics.
Narration quote: “Katia and Maurice know that these [volcanic] rocks will long outlive them. They are not religious. [They know] we all have one short life, and then we return to the ground.”
“Okay, except I knew that large rocks would outlive me when I was nine years old and going on nature hikes with my Cub Scout pack. I remember asking this very question of an adult — ‘how long have these rocks been here?’ Thousands of years, I was told.
Maurice quote: “I am never afraid because I have seen so many eruptions in 23 years that even if I die tomorrow, I don’t care.”
“Early on there’s a bizarre reference to an accidental airstrike during the Vietnam War that resulted in 20 U.S. serviceman deaths and the wounding of another ten. ‘Bizarre’ because the narration links this tragedy to a sizable anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Paris, one that Maurice and Katia attended. Why did this fratricidal mishap result in a mass antiwar demonstration? Doesn’t add up or make sense.
July’s narration: “November 23, 1967. A U.S. fighter plane dropped two snake-eye bombs along the South Vietnam border…a territory once colonized as French Indochina. Three days later Katia and Maurice join an anti-war protest in Paris.” Except the kind of friendly-fire bombing that killed those 20 Americans on Hill 875 had been happening left and right since the American war effort was intensified in 1965.
“Do most volcanologists die because of studying volcanoes at close range? No, I’ve read. There are more than 2000 people studying volcanoes as we speak, and most have to get close to volcanoes from time to time, but only 31 have been killed on the job over the last 60 years.
“Bottom line: The Kraffts didn’t perish from obsessive volcano love as much as a simple case of bad luck.”