The true story of Katia and Maurice Krafft, volcanologists and filmmakers who ultimately died in a volcanic eruption.
The glugs and gurgles and slowly popping bubbles of lava belie how fast it can actually flow – there’s something both beautiful and repulsive about it, like an over-egged, undercooked pudding. Like bears, lava flows are natural forces I erroneously think I could outrun if I had to. The Kraffts’ later careers are spent trying to outrun them too in a way, paradoxically by getting themselves closer and closer to the fire.
Miranda July, the irritatingly doleful narrator of Sara Dosa’s still-fascinating science doc/love story, introduces the pair in ageing footage from 2 June 1991 and informs us “tomorrow will be their last day”. This is though manufactured poignancy; the two knew what they were doing, and after the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz in Colombia in 1985, when over 23,000 people die in mud floods, the Kraffts realise that while they have to balance risk and safety they also have to get up close to record the extraordinary dangers so governments will take their warnings seriously.
The pair’s lightheartedness on chat show sofas is another way to get the world to watch the films they make to pay for their next volcano trip to make another film to make the world take notice. And Fire Of Love is as much about how and why as about what they do. TV Maurice leans into his persona of the funny risk taker, though they are both showmen at heart, harnessing publicity and the media, via amazing visuals, to get their knowledge out there. If a biopic is ever produced about these two, I fully expect the Kraffts to be played by John C Reilly and Anne Hathaway with glasses and a pixie cut.
“Volcanology is the science of observation – the closer they get the more they see,” intones July, and indeed we first meet Katia and Maurice digging themselves and their Land Rover out of foot-deep ice and slush then slowing edging through a fierce blizzard to get to the best view of an erupting volcano. Katia (a geochemist) and Maurice (a geologist) are nothing if not dedicated, and eventually it is to cost them their lives, something the film builds up to (both died in 1991 during the eruption of Japan’s Mount Unzen, which had previously been dormant for two centuries).
Volcanologists are an extraordinarily tough breed, often part-scientist and part-humanitarian. Katia and Maurice climb volcanic mud banks to get a better look at an exploding crater spewing forth orange fire, but also despair at the authorities ignoring the information they are given. We hear the volcanologist David A Johnston during the Mount St Helens eruption, foretelling his own death as he mans an observation station.
By the time of their deaths the Kraffts have been together 20 years, though here their courtship is rather swirled in mist, their childhoods considered not that interesting. Still that fits with the couple’s working lives, looking forward, as together they jump from one eruption across the world to another, and mostly thoroughly enjoying themselves (something which comes across strongly in the film).
Much of the film uses the couple’s own archive film footage; Maurice and Katia knew very well how to make themselves stand out, balancing attention-grabbing gimmickry with the science they actually need to get out there, though this abundance of extraordinary footage does mean this feels like a documentary done very much on their terms even though they’ve been dead for over 30 years. Interspersed with their own footage are tv appearances from the time and animations in slightly subdued colours, which add a homemade, ’70s quality to proceedings. The rainbow of yellows, oranges and reds as rivers of lava snicker and sneeze is gorgeously mesmerising; equally mesmerising is a vast pyroclastic cloud, grey and bobbly, that resembles an inflating sheep.
The dead moonscapes they traverse to get to the craters, and their necessarily heatproof outfits, look both futuristic and comical, while scenes from early in their careers, when the young couple dance on the edge of volcanos in foil and enormous metal medieval-like helmets, reminded me of Monty Python’s Black Knight. (Considering Maurice’s laid back reaction to what he calls “the volcanologist baptism” when his leg is severely burned by 140 degree mud, it presumably rates as just a flesh wound).
Volcanos are split by the pair into red (the photogenic ones) and grey (the more violent, dangerous ones), and after Mount St Helens the pair work on grey volcanos, striving to discover the triggers for the actual eruptions before they happen. Maurice describes them as like a bomb where we don’t know the length of the fuse. Volcanoes apparently have their own personalities though they seem more other-worldly than humanlike: watching lava emerging from a crust deep underwater looks like a baby xenomorph being born in an Alien film.
“One needs to have strong nerves and not panic easily,” deadpans Maurice about their chosen profession-obsession. A rubber dingy on an acid lake is Maurice’s idea, and a furious Katia, the chemist, stays behind watching from the cliff, her scarlet outfit a highly visible reminder that she is watching and she is angry. The danger is real; when they dip a piece of volcanic rock into it it sizzles like a potato hitting a deep fat fryer. It takes Maurice and his friend three hours to get to shore, battling winds. Undeterred, next he wants to canoe down a lava flow (“she said she’ll take my last photo as I set off”). The press love him, while he and Katia love volcanoes and each other.
Dosa attempts to position their existence as a lifelong Katia-Maurice-volcano throuple: “together they’re there for the volcano who is indifferent in the face of their adulation,” says July. Though we don’t come away with any great insight into the Kraffts’ relationship, beyond what they were prepared to share in their own highly curated films to drive interest in their quests. What does come across is that whereas movies often posit the journey as being what matters, in Fire of Love it truly is the destination.
Watch the official Fire of Love trailer: