SXSW: Fire of Love Review
“In this fire, two lovers found a home” is the tagline for Fire of Love, the National Geographic-produced documentary about the amazing 25-year romance between French volcano scientists Maurice and Katia Krafft. A better one might have been a paraphrase of a certain old Onion headline: “Romance between volcanologists ends predictably.”
It’s an outstanding documentary, featuring some truly breathtaking footage, and it succeeds in conveying what these two people, and their obsession with volcanoes, were all about.
The film, directed by Sara Dosa, debuted at Sundance in January and played at South by Southwest in March. National Geographic — which had a relationship with the couple when they were alive — won a reportedly expensive bidding war out of Sundance, and while the release plan has not been announced, it’s likely eventually wind up on Disney+, on its National Geographic tab.
The two Kraffts met in the mid-1960s and spent the next two and a half decades roaming the world and getting close to active volcanos. Like Costeau, except on land instead of sea, the two were also photographers and filmmakers, and Fire of Love makes fine use of some of their outstanding footage. They were, after all, much closer to the action of volcanoes than were most of their contemporaries. Re-storing and reassembling all of that footage, I gather, was a massive undertaking.
Both Maurice and Katia perished in 1991 while filming a volcanic eruption at Mount Unzen in Japan, having flown too close not to the sun, but the volcano.
The model is clearly Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, also about its obsessive subject going to the ends of the earth in an extreme human endeavor. And indeed, Herzog himself even made a documentary of his own about volcanoes, 2016’s Into the Inferno, which in part told their story.
The one thing about Fire of Love that doesn’t quite work is the narration, by actress and filmmaker Miranda July, which is unbearably twee and does a great deal of telling but not showing.
Even so, Fire of Love is an amazing undertaking, and likely to go down as one of the best documentaries of the year.
- Stephen Silver
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