On Tuesday night at the 2220 Arts & Archive on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles, Acropolis Cinema had a screening of Oliver Laxe’s Fire Will Come (France/Spain, 2023), a quiet follow-up to his blistering 2016 Mimosas. There are some hints of the kind of film-making that we see in Laxe’s latest film Sirāt,” shot in Spain but in a landscape resembling the West Sahara country occupied by Morocco. Clocking in at 80-minutes, Fire Will Come takes place in Trás-os-Montes (“Beyond the Mountains”), an isolated pocket of Northeast Portugal near Galicia, the semi-autonomous region of Northwest Spain with its regional capital at Santiago de Compostela. Known for its mountainous terrain, vast forests and green wooded valleys, this corner of Portugal often has forest fires.
Director Oliver Laxe grew up in this rugged countryside of Galicia nearby in Spain – which has its own language (Galician) and which shares more similarities to Portuguese than to Spanish. Fire Will Come is set in that idyllic landscape of rural Trás-os-Montes where forests play a large part in the story and the minimalist dialogue is in Galician. Laxe paints an immersive portrait of the Galician countryside, in which the mystery and beauty of the landscape dwarfs the inner turmoil of those who occupy it.
In the mesmerizing opening of this film set in a mountainous region of Galicia, Spain, we enter a misty forest at night and witness a group of incredible eucalyptus trees fall backwards in a swoon of submission. It turns out that they are being cut down by the bulldozers of a group wanting to build a new pleasure palace and resort. Many poor villagers back the project as a means of building up the economically stressed area. The prologue shows mighty, many eucalyptus trees falling one after another before we cut to the great unfeeling bulldozers tearing them down below. They’re piloted by men but you wouldn’t know it from the way Laxe films them, like leviathans swallowing the landscape.
The film becomes more conventionally slow afterwards, following a man named and played by Amador played by a man named Amador Arias (the degree to which Laxe blends fact and fiction is probably the film’s most interesting mystery) who returns home after serving time for an Arson conviction. Amador’s 89-year-old mother Benedicta is happy to see him, and could use the help grazing her cattle.
The rest of the locals look on Amador with suspicion and derision. They bring up his crime early and often. Amador himself is cagey about his own guilt, neither confirming nor denying his precise involvement. The title, however, is a promise, and the prejudice of even the nicest villager is tested when they want someone to blame.
The ideas certainly work, that it seems credible when men driving earth movers destroy the forest but a fire needs a single culprit. Laxe is very convincingly picking apart our moral ineptitude for dealing with the destruction of the world. It’s the construction of his argument that leaves one wanting, with too many conversations filmed indifferently. Amador and his mother are our POV characters and they are remote, to say the least. His mother, played by Benedicta Sánchez, is a splendid screen presence, telegraphing her emotions from beneath her immovably wrinkled face. Watching her tend to her cows could have been a whole movie, but I suppose we wouldn’t have learned much.
The best scene in the film is probably a cow in the back of vet’s truck listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” as the wind blows through its horns. Spanish director Oliver Laxe shows Amador’s lack of social graces when Elena (Elena Mar Fernandez), a local vet, helps him rescue a calf stranded and stuck in creek.
On the way back home, she turns on the radio and the two them listen silently to Leonard Cohen singing “Suzanne.” That image is hauntingly beautiful. His cinematographer Mauro Herce, whose images of trees and fires, captures the disarmingly un-posed ordinariness of his actors’ faces and sharp sounds of their environment.
When she invites him for coffee, he declines, and we sense that loneliness, loss, and anxiety have taken away the man he once was. In a scene where Amador is drinking beer alone in a pub, Elena approaches him as if to invite him to go somewhere, or to avow her feelings in some acceptable fashion. By then, we know the inhabitants of this part of rural Galicia to be too emotionally unavailable for any desire to find a way of manifesting itself. So, it doesn’t come as a surprise that all that comes out of the veterinarian’s mouth is: “What I wanted to ask you is how your cow is doing.”
As the title predicts, another fire happens and some villagers believe it was Amador’s work. But why would he try to damage the majestic forest he loves? It’s a tribute to the filmmaker’s sensitivity to subtle character development that filmgoers will not be quick to judge Amador.
The film is much more in synchrony with the haziness of its imagery when it preserves the awkwardness between characters, the impossibility for anything other than life’s basic staples to be exchanged.
Given the rich simplicity of the scenario, Laxe recognizes that even the smallest amount of traditional plot would feel excessive. The movements and intentions of the film’s camera, philosophy, and rhythms bear a lyrical kinship to this eponymous region of the in the south of Galicia, not far from Portugal.
