Review: 'Fire of Love' is a blazing documentary, capturing two scientists' love for each other and their dangerous love for volcanoes

Director Sara Dosa’s “Fire of Love” is one of those movies that had to be a documentary — because no one would believe a narrative film with such a strange story and such compelling characters.

Maurice and Katia Krafft were in love, though the details of their first meeting have fallen into the level of myth. It might have been on a park bench at their college, or at a movie screening, or a blind date. Whichever it was, the subject of volcanoes came up at some point, and the two realized they were kindred spirits.

The two became inseparable from then on. They conducted their first expedition in 1968, getting grant money and a donated car to check out volcanoes in Iceland. Two years later, they were married in a small ceremony in their home province of Alsace, France — and vowed not to have children, because they would be too busy traveling the globe to study volcanoes.

The timing was perfect. The Kraffts started their joint career just as the theory of plate tectonics — the idea that the Earth’s crust is a series of interlocking plates, and the seams are where volcanoes and earthquakes occur — was becoming accepted science. Though Maurice espoused his belief that every volcano was different, he and Katia broke down volcanoes into two main groups: “Red” volcanoes that produce lava flows, and “gray” volcanoes that explode with torrents of ash and rocks.

Maurice and Katia said the color designations could be explained by plate tectonics. “Red” volcanoes occurred when two plates pulled apart, allowing magma to rise to the surface as lava. “Gray” volcanoes were the opposite, the result of two plates pushing against each other, forcing material upward explosively.

At first, the Kraffts mostly studied the “red” volcanoes, and did so by getting breathtakingly close to the lava. They called it a “calculated risk,” but invaluable for getting good data and, more importantly, great footage — and it’s that footage that makes “Fire of Love” such a beautiful and intense movie.

The couple switched to studying “gray” volcanoes after Mt. St. Helens blew in 1980, killing 57 people nearby and spewing ash for hundreds of miles (including on my house in Spokane when I was a sophomore in high school). It was Katia’s ambition to create a warning system for active volcanoes, something that could save lives if people evacuate in time.

Dosa has pored through hundreds of hours of the Kraffts’ footage, much of it astonishing in its beauty and danger level. She also compiles the couple’s writings and TV appearances — their daring exploits made them stars in France — into a running narrative, written by Dosa, Shane Boris, Erin Casper and Jocelyne Chaput. The narration, delivered by filmmaker and performance artist Miranda July, is tender and poetic.

Dosa’s film paints an aching portrait of two people who adored each other and the adventure their lives had taken. “Fire of Love” is among the most passionate, and most tragic, love stories you’re likely to see in a long time.

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‘Fire of Love’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, July 22, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Rated PG for thematic material including some unsettling images, and brief smoking.. Running time: 93 minutes; partly in French, with subtitles.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 21, 2022, when the film premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.