“Exploring Patriarchal Myths and Natural Disasters: A Review of ‘El Agua'”

In a town in the southern Spanish province of Alicante, the world has come to an end. Here you either suffocate in the sweltering summer heat or get bored to death in the company of young people dancing, lazily hanging out, clinking glasses and teasing each other. The women joke openly about sex, while the men pick up vulgar arguments about it. Some are thinking of escaping this traditional sadness, like Ana.

The teenager comes from a family that men say is cursed. She proudly shows off her scorpion tattoo, smokes cigarettes like there’s no tomorrow anyway. But then there is José, who is said to have worked abroad for a long time and with whom Ana falls in love. At the worst possible time, because the summer storm of emotions is pushed aside by a real storm on the horizon. Neighboring towns have already been flooded.

The river takes the women by force

Water is the connecting and dividing, the longed for and the devouring element in «El Agua», the feature film debut of the Spanish director Elena López Riera, who now lives in Geneva. Her old hometown of Orihuela is located in one of the driest areas of Spain. But when it rains here, it rains to the point of flooding. Riera combines this real, geographical fact with fragments of a myth that the inhabitants spread about the river.

The river was once in love with a young, beautiful woman. Because he couldn’t have her, he snatched her up in his floods. That is why the waters stink of death. This legend is told by the mothers and grandmothers of the village, almost all embodied by lay people from the area, in documentary interview passages. The women also tell Ana about their own earlier love relationships and their banal, tragic endings, when the men’s beautiful hands retain their strength but have lost their magic: “First love breaks you.”

Mystical elevation of patriarchy

The Swiss production (along with France and Spain) ran in Cannes and at the Zurich Film Festival in the Focus competition last year. The film was nominated twice for the Swiss Film Prize this year, but ended up empty-handed. Perhaps because the mixture of documentary precision and mythical exaggeration of patriarchy is not very suitable for the masses.

Sometimes «El Agua», with its vagueness and the different levels, gets a little vague and uncertain. But the images, full of subliminal secrets, have a power of suggestion that lasts a little longer than a summer storm.