National Geographic’s documentary Fire of Love is easily one of this year’s most engaging films. Its larger-than-life subjects are the late Maurice and Katia Krafft, the world’s only well-known volcanologist couple. Devoted to studying volcanoes closely, the Kraffts shot astonishing footage under extremely dangerous conditions. The intensity of the film relies on the couple’s fascinating archives, but an unfortunate series of precious animated vignettes and pretentious narration partly undercut the story’s extraordinary power.
From the 1960s until their death in July 1991 on Japan’s Mount Unzen, the Kraffts led globetrotting lives, exploring volcanoes as intimately as humanly possible. Throughout the film, we see them venture into risky situations that most people would avoid at all costs. Maurice Krafft aptly refers to their lives as “a kamikaze existence lived in the beauty of volcanic things.” In contemporary interviews, the pair come off as personable and warm, making light of the life-threatening circumstances their métier took them to. The Kraffts were daredevils, but with a quiet courage and cheerfulness that makes them all the more appealing.
What the Kraffts recorded isn’t dry science, but a sweeping visual feast. Countless hours of film are distilled into mesmerizing montages of volcanic power, alternating between epic eruptions and smaller, specific details of their aftermath. The scenes of devastation volcanoes leave in their wake are chilling. The tight shots of glowing molten lava, pyroclastic flows, and other volcanic phenomena become almost abstract. The volcanoes are the true stars of Fire of Love, and in what is likely a cinematic first, they get screen credits.
The Kraffts were fully aware of how puny human beings appear alongside their subjects’ primeval fury, and their footage continually bears this out. The film also explores the pair’s daily life and work between missions. Occasionally, they take even wilder risks, like when Maurice goes rafting on a lake that’s mostly sulfuric acid.
Where the flow ebbs in Fire of Love is in its narration, delivered in a pretentious deadpan by actress Miranda July. The text is largely well-written, but her delivery is tonally completely wrong for this epic tale. Aside from this misjudged artistic choice, a string of interstitial animated inserts is also jarring and unwelcome. Done in a simplistic style, they come off as twee and out of place. Like the narration, their calculated clumsiness (à la Wes Anderson) clashes with the Kraffts’ films’ majesty.
It’s rare to see a documentary that is so extraordinarily strong in certain respects and so weak in others, but Fire of Love has so much in its favor that it’s worthwhile viewing. The film clocks in at 93 minutes (a miracle in these days of ridiculously overlong movies), proving that economy is an artistic virtue.
Fire of Love is a vivid reminder that all it takes to make exciting spectacles beyond mainstream Hollywood’s explosive CGI excess is two intrepid souls with vision, bravery, and a camera.