Film Review - Alcarràs
Images courtesy of Palace Films.
Despite the sea of remakes, sequels, and prequels, great independent artists continue to make beautiful and profound films; among those artists are names like Sean Baker, Mati Diop, the Safdie Brothers, and, now, Carla Simón. This is Simón’s second feature film following Summer 1993 (a masterful dissection of grief in dramatic form) that has, again, been recognised in the international film festival circuit, winning the Golden Bear at The Berlin International Film Festival, its most prestigious award.
The story centres around a family of peach farmers whose livelihoods are disrupted by the owner, who plans to install solar panels on the land, giving them until the end of the harvest to come to terms with the farm's impending doom. Set in Alcarràs, Catalonia, director Simón continues to showcase life in rural Spain and express her love for the Catalan language and landscape. The town of Alcarràs is home to a very specific dialect of Catalan; because of this, the actors in the film are primarily played by non-actors who were born in and now live in Catalonia and who adorably refer to each other by their characters' names after filming. Simón’s imagery is slow and controlled, which shows an incredible ability to control the flow of information, allowing the audience to pick up the puzzle pieces themselves and figure out why the events play out the way they do instead of telling us. Most notably, the movie only uses diegetic sounds (and music if applicable) to set the tone of the film, allowing the sounds of the actors, machinery, and the silence of the world to speak for themselves.
Like Summer 1993, the movie deals with the concepts of transition and maturity as the characters are forced into situations that are uncomfortable but unavoidable. The father of the family, Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet), refuses to accept the fact that he is losing the family farm as he drowns himself in work and ‘kicks the dog’ at his children and brother-in-law. His son, Roger (Albert Bosch), uses marajuana and alcohol to escape his overbearing and judgemental father, who doesn’t recognise his son's natural ability to do the farm work - a reflection of his own insecurities. The most interesting relationship in the story is between Mariona (Xènia Roset) and her grandfather Rogelio (Josep Abad), whom Mariona looks after as he reluctantly accepts that he is ageing and a case of early-onset dementia begins, giving the film one of its most beautiful sequences as Rogelio walks the farm through the night and into the morning.
Alcarràs is a moving piece of cinema that will quietly consume you for its two-hour runtime with feelings of awe, anticipation, some chuckles, and empathy for the farmers that put fruit into our homes. If you want to watch a film that breaks away from the all-consuming Hollywood system and finds you amidst a delightful and emotionally enriching story, then this just may be for you.
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Alcarràs is screening in cinemas from Thursday 27th July. For tickets and more info, click here.