Fire of Love (2022)
dir. Sara Dosa
Rated: PG
image: ©2022 National Geographic Documentary Films
“Understanding is love’s other name.”
That quote is attributed to Thích Nhất Hạnh, an influential Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk and peace activist. Known as the “father of mindfulness,” Hanh died at the age of 95 in January of this year. The quote appears in documentary filmmaker Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love, an examination of the lives and work of volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. At this moment, I can’t recall in what context the quote appears in the movie. I don’t remember if it’s spoken by either Katia or Maurice, if the film’s narrator – filmmaker and actor Miranda July – utters it during the film, or if it appears on screen in text form. I quickly jotted it down in my notes as I watched Fire of Love, but I failed to add an attribution.
The exact context of those words within the documentary isn’t important. At a broader level, the sentiment behind Hanh’s idea is a beautiful and apt thesis statement for everything Dosa explores in her picture. Understanding was at the heart of Katia and Maurice’s personal and professional lives together. It is what the pair were trying to achieve with the white-hot intensity of their decades-long study of volcanos.
We learn very early on in Fire of Love – and it’s also revealed in the movie’s trailer – that Katia and Maurice died in the shadow of what they both loved so much. In June of 1991, the pair were killed while filming the eruptions of Mount Unzen in Japan. Their quixotic journey to document and study volcanic activity, in an attempt to create an early warning system to save lives, brought to mind comparisons to Christopher McCandless.
A different sort of adventurer, McCandless was the subject of Jon Krakauer’s nonfiction book Into the Wild, which was subsequently adapted into a film of the same name, directed by Sean Penn. McCandless, who died in the Alaskan wild – probably from poisoning-induced starvation – in an attempt to live off the land, is now a folk-hero among some. To others, he’s a damn fool who didn’t know what he was doing and got in over his head.
You can’t say Katia and Maurice didn’t know what they were doing.
Maurice’s fascination with volcanos started at a very early age, and he ended up studying geology at university. Katia was a biochemist with degrees in physics and chemistry. They knew the science, but, like McCandless, the Krafft’s were singularly focused on their obsession. They were willing to take risks that others weren’t in order to commune with what they considered the most awe-inspiring – and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, a very deadly – force of nature.
In addition to being scientists, the Krafft’s were also forced to become filmmakers in their own right, since the stunning footage the two captured together was their path to funding future research. The 1970s and ‘80s were Katia and Maurice’s most active and prolific period, and you can see the influence of someone like Jacques Cousteau – whose own zenith came immediately prior, in the ‘50s and ‘60s – on the volcanologists’ aesthetic.
The pairs’ adorable matching outfits, worn for the benefit of their on-screen appearances, one-up even Cousteau. It would be easy to believe that it was the Krafft’s who served as Wes Anderson’s inspiration for the costumes and general aesthetic of his The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, at the very least in addition to Cousteau’s own inspiration. It’s their little hats – and the fact that they also hailed from France – that brought the connection to Cousteau immediately to mind.
Director Dosa must have been overjoyed – but simultaneously overwhelmed – by the amount of Krafft footage she had to cull through for her film. If memory serves, every frame within Fire of Love comes from archival footage shot by the couple, with possibly the only exception to that being other archival material contemporary to the timeframe covered by the movie.
What we see of Katia and Maurice’s volcano home movies is wondrous and spectacular. The couple were willing to get closer to the danger than perhaps any other of their volcanologist peers. One shot shows one-half of the pair – the other was filming – as they stand on the precipice of an impossibly giant spewing geyser of lava. The head-to-toe protective suit – think of an outfit you might see people wearing who are dealing with radioactive material – adds little comfort when you consider that any shift in the lava’s direction could have easily spelled disaster for one or both of the adventurers, considering how close they were to it.
The incredible images that the Krafft’s captured, and that Dosa and her editors, Erin Casper and Jocelyn Chaput, painstakingly assemble for their documentary, are a sight to behold, preferably on as big of a screen as you can get yourself in front of. The stark beauty and terror on display in Fire of Love reminded me of another documentary about an artist going to great lengths to bear witness to the awesome splendor of nature and humanity’s place within it.
As with Fire of Love, 2014’s The Salt of the Earth juxtaposes nature’s indescribable beauty with its complete indifference to human affairs. Both Katia and Maurice could tell you – and do tell us, in different ways during the course of our journey with them – about the heartbreaking reality of something so majestic that is also capable of death and destruction on such an unimaginable scale.
We also get a few side quests with the couple, like when the hard-headed Maurice and a few colleagues decide to become the first to row out onto a lake made of sulfuric acid. You know, for science. Maurice relates in voiceover how Katia, being a chemist, wanted nothing to do with the excursion. We see Maurice try to collect a sample from the lake. He is thwarted when the lake dissolves his sample collection container and, nearly, the row boat he and his compatriots foolishly set out in.
Every couple has disagreements, right? Katia might not have been supportive of a sulfuric acid lake cruise, but Dosa makes it clear that when it came to their love of volcanos and each other, the Krafft’s were of one mind. In one of Katia’s journal entries, she relates that Maurice says they are crazy for staying so close to the eruption they are currently studying. “And yet,” she says, “we stay.”
We also learn throughout the course of Fire of Love that the couple had made peace with the idea of dying for the thing they both loved so much. Katia says during the film that she walks close to Maurice when they are in treacherous volcanic territory. If he dies, she says, she wants to be close enough to him that she dies, too.
That becomes a much more real possibility after the devastating effects of the March 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, in Washington state. The Krafft’s were pioneers in the simplest classification imaginable of volcanos. (There’s a funny bit early in the film in which a young and brash Maurice basically says that it’s only old fuddy-duddy academics who try to classify a thing, and always to within an inch of its life.) They split volcanos into two categories: red and gray.
Red volcanos are harmless, they said, because the lava flows are more predictable and stable, making them easier to study and approach. Gray volcanos, with their unpredictable and pulverizing explosions and the resultant deadly ash plumes and mudslides, are much more dangerous. After Mount St. Helens, the two dedicated all of their research to learning as much as possible about gray volcanos, in an effort to save lives. That dedication is what ultimately took their lives.
Fire of Love is by turns exultant, melancholy, and awe-inspiring. The love story – and it’s a love story in two senses – at the heart of the film is a testament to human obsession, ingenuity, and relentlessness. We get to know this couple. We see, in vivid detail, Maurice’s gregariousness and prankish sense of humor, Katia’s inextinguishable sense of wonder and her wide, cheerful smile.
The Kraffts died young, Katia at 49 and Maurice at 45. Their love story had murky origins. We know for sure that 1966 is the year they met. The film presents three plausible scenarios as their origin story. Which version was true seemed not to concern them, nor should it concern us. Once they had pledged their love to each other, both nurtured their collective love affair with volcanos. It ended their lives, but the movie makes it seem doubtful that either one would express a single regret about what they spent their lives doing, who they spent it with, or how it ended.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- Dosa plumbs the depths of love and obsession here. The portrait she paints of these unlikely adventurers, almost exclusively using their own words and records, is one of dedication and unconditional love, both for each other and the phenomenon that they spent their lives studying.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- I enjoyed how Dosa fashions the opening credits of her documentary like they’re for a blockbuster action movie.
- Fire of Love is filled with these little animations that work nicely to break up all the archival footage.
- There is also a motif of a seismograph needle jumping to life that works really well in each context in which it’s used.
- The score, by Nicolas Godin, aka one-half of the French rock band Air, is, according to my notes, “weird and cool.” Yep, that’s Air!
- Miranda July’s narration is dry and methodically paced. Overall the effect blends nicely with the subject matter, but I’ll be honest, at times she sounded kind of bored.
- I didn’t really get into this in the main review – mainly because I felt I was already comparing Fire of Love to too many other movies – but this documentary brought to mind a splendid 2017 doc called Mountain. Volcanos are kind of the evil twin of mountains, so the two would make an interesting double feature. If you haven’t seen Mountain, seek it out.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Saw this with Rae at a screening in the big auditorium at the Texas Theatre. There was a good-sized crowd in attendance for an intimate documentary, probably between two and three dozen. Fire of Love is currently playing in limited release theatrically, and the internet tells me it will be available to stream on Disney+ on the 10th of August.