Mark Reviews Movies: FIRE OF LOVE

Fire of Love, National Geographic Documentary Films, NEON

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 5, 2022

Director Sara Dosa's Fire of Love doesn't try to hide the fate of her subjects. They are Katia and Maurice Krafft, a married pair of volcanologists. Their lives and work must have been vital to that scientific field and beyond for a documentary to be made about the two, and that's likely the extent of what anyone watching knows about them at the start of this film. There is one other fact we learn, as Dosa shows footage of the couple recording an active volcano in Japan: This footage was taken the day before both of them died. With the story's ending revealed, we're left to grapple with the mystery, greater meaning, and, obviously, constant danger of the Kraffts' shared life together.

There's a haunting quality to Dosa's film, which is established with its opening, as the narration continues by openly contemplating the empty spaces and left-behind tokens that remain after the couple died in 1991. That feeling permeates the rest of this narrative, too, which is made up of archival interviews, readings from journals, and who knows how much film—both still photographs and motion pictures—that the Kraffts created over the course of about two decades' worth of study.

With that work, there might come an immediate belief about the kind of people Katia and Maurice were—thrill-seeking, reckless to some extent, apathetic to their own safety, certain of at least some kind of invulnerability to some of the most destructive elements of nature. There's some truth in those assumptions, but the filmmaker gives the Kraffts the benefit of legitimate curiosity, thoughtfulness, and compassion. There had to be more to the couples' work and lives for this ultimately fatal obsession to last as long as it did. Dosa wants to know, and she wants us to understand it, too.

Since the subject of that obsession is essentially of a geological nature, Dosa's perspective and tone possess a kind of dispassionate, objective, and far-looking qualities. Much of that is imbued by the narration, written by the director (along with the team of Shane Boris, Erin Casper, and Jocelyne Chaput) and spoken by another filmmaker. The film's voice belongs to Miranda July, whose intonations are soft and almost earthy, with lilts of kindness and melancholy.

There's a sense of distance in the narration, from the quiet reading and the ways in which the text sometimes places the Kraffts' relationship within the context of millions of years of Earth's history. July's tenor, though, also removes any feeling of judgment from the many, many scenes of Katia and Maurice standing within a volcano's crater, watching and occasionally dodging bursts of lava.

As unlikely as it may seem to most of us, that was their shared passion. One of the oddities of the Kraffts' relationship, which does give Dosa a good reason to view it from a much broader and more philosophical perspective, is how many coincidences existed between them, even before they met.

They grew up within 12 miles of each other in the Alsace region of France, and as children, each of them developed a fascination with geology and, specifically, volcanoes. At some point in their respective youths, both of them visited the island of Stromboli, with its iconic volcano. Call it fate, destiny, or some happy chance of the natural forces of the planet and beyond, but it's a hopeful mystery regardless of the name one gives it. The story of how they actually met in their 20s is something of a mystery, as well, since life for both—as professionals, in the public eye, and with any set purpose—didn't actually begin until they met and instantly became inseparable.

They married in 1970, went on a honeymoon to their beloved Stromboli, decided against having children, and dedicated themselves to traveling the globe to witness as many volcanic eruptions as possible. Dosa assembles the vast library of the Kraffts' archive into a fairly basic timeline of their lives and visual documentation of the risks they took in getting right next to the mouth volcano after erupting volcano. Maurice claimed he wasn't a filmmaker, since he only recorded his studies in order to obtain grant money to go on the next expedition, but Dosa finds outtakes of staged moments that serve as a counterpoint to his assertion and, on a fundamental level, hint at the ease and comfort these two had with each other.

Yes, there is a sweet love story amidst the exceptional photographs and film the Kraffts captured, although it's not without its moments of difficulty and tension. One such episode, for example, revolves around Maurice's desire to sail a lake of concentrated sulfuric acid, while Katia looks on with obvious fear and frustration at her husband's ego-driven irresponsibility. In a journal entry read later, she makes the reason for that fear—beyond the obvious—rather clear: Katia typically walks behind Maurice when they're at a volcano, because she knows that, wherever—even to death—her husband goes, she will follow. It's an equally horrifying and lovely thought, and that's the sort of contradiction that Dosa's film so simply but wisely communicates.

More and more extraordinary footage follows. The Kraffts' journeys to new volcanoes and studies of the "friendly" red varieties—the ones with lava flows that are more or less set by valleys and gravity—continue through the years. Both Katia and Maurice dream of simply being together on this adventure without needing the excuse of doing scientific research. As he also plans to ride a canoe through a lava flow, she is more sensible, and after witnessing the devastation and death of a mudslide caused by a grey volcano—the "killer" and more explosive variety—in Colombia, the talk of the canoe ends. Their lives and work have a higher purpose now—to stop unnecessary death resulting from the terrifying but beautiful, destructive but intrinsically creative force they love.

The Kraffts' lives and work do mean something tangible, measurable, and beneficial by the end of Fire of Love. The film itself, though, finds deeper meaning in the evidence of what they meant to each other, as well as the mysteries of their almost pre-ordained existence together.

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