Critique: ‘Fire of Love’ is a film of fiery question and whimsy

By Jake Coyle | Associated Press

Rarely have the disorders for adore been significantly less hospitable than in Sara Dosa’s documentary “Fire of Adore.” Still listed here, amid shifting tectonics and quaking craters, French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft forge a surprisingly rock-continuous romance.

“Fire of Really like,” excavates their special tale, and the jaw-dropping footage the Kraffts left powering, in a movie exploding with awe for the mysterious alchemies of adore and obsession.

The Kraffts were prominent experts in the ’70s and ’80s whose passion and occasional purple knit hats produced them a bit like the Cousteaus of the volcano entire world. Like that underwater explorer, the Kraffts also picked up filmmaking to chronicle their investigations — which usually drew them, like moths to the flame, perilously shut to not-at-all-dormant volcanoes. They died in 1991 in a cascading gray cloud on Japan’s Mount Unzen, leaving driving hundreds of hours of footage, and as narrator Miranda July states early in the movie, a million queries.

Maurice, a gregarious geologist, and Katia, a far more reserved geochemist, had been introduced together by their mutual infatuation for volcanoes. Immediately after marrying, they determined not to have small children and in its place focused themselves to becoming, as Maurice conditions it, “volcano runners.” They journey from active volcano to energetic volcano, residing according to the Earth’s rhythms. With a wry smile, they confess lots of of their colleagues check out them as weirdos.

“If I could take in rocks, I’d remain on the volcano and in no way arrive down,” Maurice claims proudly in just one Tv set job interview.

Dosa employs July’s narration to frame the Kraffts’ tale with a playful sense of wonder and whimsy — a from time to time overly intrusive, also neatly packaged system in a film where what’s on screen is so overwhelmingly impressive that it might not need to have the further layer.

Again and all over again, we see the couple traversing charred alien landscapes with geysers of spewing lava. Their protecting outfits are a little nutty, too, like props from an previous science-fiction film or something left around from the henchmen of a Bond villain. But with rivers of red all around, they are practically at engage in — wild silhouettes dancing on the precipice. When established to Brian Eno’s beguiling “The Significant Ship,” the imagery isn’t hellish but heavenly.

On a single volcano, Maurice fries an egg on the very hot floor. On an additional, he paddles an inflatable raft over a steaming lake of acid. Katia objects to that gambit but they are resolutely inseparable. Nevertheless, if “Fire of Love” is principally a enjoy story, the chemistry we see concerning them isn’t the kind that will make you swoon. It’s effortless to ponder if what binds them together isn’t so substantially really like as mutual obsession. They both of those melt away with a purple-very hot want fewer for every single other than to be as near to the volcano as achievable. Are they chasing everyday living, or demise? Maurice calls it “a kamikaze existence.”

But what’s unknowable is also at the heart of “Fire of Really like,” a motion picture about two folks not concerned but intoxicated by forces much larger sized than they are. Katia and Maurice are, she says, “like flies in a saucepan which is boiling over.” And it is their contagious feeling of awe for mother nature that retains the flames of “Fire of Love” smoldering.

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“Fire of Love”

3 stars out of 4

Rating: PG (for thematic substance together with some unsettling pictures, and quick using tobacco)

Operating time: 93 minutes