Coproduction between Switzerland, Spain and France, El Agua proposes the vision of the Spanish director Elena López Riera of the youth of his country. Sensual and sensitive film of a summer as stubborn as threatening...
Storm threat
The sky covers. The storm patiently waits to break into waves, contenting for the moment to threaten on the horizon its heavy cumulonimbus violets. Soon it will be too late. The water will be there, flood a soil too long dry. There'll be damage. There will be dead people. But what to do that wait? This is the only option offered to Ana (the solar Luna Pamies) and his group of buddies. Let yourself be abated by the sun, yield to the impulses of love and slowly mature in the sun of this impoverished Spain. A sensual wandering, carried by the body of a youth who no longer believes in it but who still strives to pretend...
The river is there from the beginning of the film. Slaloming snake between malingrous reeds, carrying the plastic scraps of a tentacular society, well suicidal to pollute everything including its water. The cluster of young people smoke near this poisonous water net. Kill time. Confidences, sex stories, mute along the narrative. Simmer. Then Ana evokes a fable already dear to Nicolas Winding Refn in Drive The scorpion and frog. The arachnide asks a frog to climb on its back to cross the river, and facing its amphibian insistence ends up yielding despite the fear of the darter... Arriving in the middle of the river, the scorpion stings the frog, both condemning them. Questioning his gesture, the scorpion replied: « It's in my nature. ».
The scorpion dart
The scorpion is Ana. It's José, his lover. It is absolutely all these young perfused with beliefs, fears, a whole range of injunctions inoculated from generation to generation as strange hereditary diseases. For if indeed the act of transmission depicted by El Agua can be beautiful (the father teaches the son to mount a wall, the initiation of picking lemons, the grandmother teaches her granddaughter to peel artichokes...), he is mostly separated by a sexual constraint. Men and their sons on one side, women and their daughters on the other, creating a compartmentalization where genders only mix when the desire of the other begins.
A compartmentalisation that will make macerate the miasms of a macho society, feeding itself. That a moment of error leads a young man (in this case, José, the lover of Ana) to a point of sentimentalism that the quilobets, mockery and violence of the other men present are in. The same goes for Ana, who, when she evokes her emerging love to her mother, receives only vague cynical threats... The slightest deviance from the existing system is immediately reframed, until a personal self-protection mechanism ends up internalizing these gender reflexes. Thus, machism is inherited, no longer needs to dominate as it is integrated, digested, crushed up to the point of immiscating both the DNA of future executioners and future victims.
Dualist thought
And violence crushing women takes place in El Agua in parallel with a violence made to nature, materialized by a legend evoked by short side-camera inserts that mark the feature film. There women narrated the myth of a lady swallowed by the waves. Sacrifice necessary, blind, to calm the wrath of the revengeful tides? Maybe. In any case enough to engrave this fear in the minds of women, and to transmit, generation after generation, this fear of water. An engraved fear – internalised as well – doubling the relationship with water. Vital but terrifying...
From there to draw a bridge between male domination and nature domination, there is only one step. A dualist thought, theorized by Val Plumwood in particular, which crosses El Agua until his final scene. Whether compartmentalization concerns men and women, or human and nature, the result is the same: systematic justification of abuse. And if these young people constantly dream of another – until they fantasize it, like José – they don't have much more than their imagination to extract from their condition...
Industrial disposal
The moments of sharing are overwhelmed by this reminder to the inevitable productivist carcan that surrounds us: a moment of relaxation in a pool, between friends, soon crushed by a perfectly alienating commercial area environment; a discussion at the edge of a plastic brook; night watering of lemon trees where contemplation is soon hastened by a need for efficiency... The creeping capitalism seems to simmer in each scene and rot from within this youth locked in a viciated box.
But if we mention here a theoretical pan advancing in submarine in Elena López Riera's work, El Agua never becomes a pamphlet or an eco-feminism manual, on the contrary. Sensory cinema overflowing with sunshine, orchestrating in its settings the alienation of a rural youth to whom there is little left for ecstasy...
An exciting film by what he puts in place and by permissions that grant. When you think about it, it seems absurd that all this part of the cinema, engulfed in its budgetary constraints, controlled by oily financiers, which ends up not allowing anything anymore... Take a medium so free and end up claustering. By working in a closed vacuum, re-filming again and again what has managed to abduct the masses quick to throw away their money, gratifying themselves before the notions « test » and « new ». El Agua certainly is not one of those! The young director Elena López Riera offers, tempts, invents, manipulates genres, entertains the intrication between documentary and fiction, mixes the image diets and finally gives birth to a sensual, intelligent film that has never been seen elsewhere.
« The fantastic, again. I'd like to go to a ghost thing... »
And when asked about the rest of her career she concedes wanting to search a fantastic vein by simiscating in a ghost story, one can only rejoice!
Data sheet
DVD Zone B (France)
Publisher: Blaq Out
Duration: 100 min
Release date: 18 July 2023
Video format : 576p/25 - 1.85
Soundtrack Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 (and 2.0)
Subtitles French
And another work to discover, a !!!
[...] which we are interested in today would rather be looking for the magnificent El Agua released last year. Same themes, same territory, same youth [...]