Fire of Love
20227.5movie
People
Where to Watch
Hulu
Disney PlusA doomed love triangle between intrepid French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft, and their beloved volcanoes.
HuluDisney PlusA doomed love triangle between intrepid French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft, and their beloved volcanoes.
“Fire of Love,” which also includes animated sequences, has some of the willful enchantment of a children’s book. Even Maurice’s flights of philosophical rhetoric — he and Katia were French intellectuals, after all — have a naïve charm, expressing a sense of inexhaustible, starry-eyed wonder. The objects of that fascination are lethally destructive and scarily unpredictable, but, for the Kraffts, the danger was part of the allure. “Fire of Love” is a romance shadowed by tragedy.
The film, as the over-ornate narration by Miranda July stresses, is a love story. But the romance goes three ways: between the gamine geochemist Katia, the ursine, showboating geologist Maurice and the volcanoes that united them. The film’s approach skirts around the actual science of the Kraffts’ work, but it does explore the psychology of a shared passion, of a couple who melted their boots together on smoking lava flows and danced by the craters in a confetti of volcanic bombs. Watch a trailer for Fire of Love. This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025.
