Cinema is an art of ghosts, mirrors and simulacra. Perhaps in this order she could, in fact, trace his biography. In front of a movie like Waterfallthe debut of Elena López Riera from Alicante, who walks victoriously through festivals around the world Since its premiere in Cannes, it seems inevitable to retrieve some ideas about the very nature of images.
Beyond your emotional reach, the film’s intellectual ambition is manifested by the combination of formats, intentions and even tonesbe they of ferocious naturalism, of aesthetic imaginaries, of dramatic conventions, of invented realities or of documentary archives.
All this is present, in a sometimes difficult but always fruitful coexistence, in a film that investigates the background (a sort of inner investigation that feels autobiographical) in the forms. With the story of Ana (played by newcomer Luna Pamies, one of the great discoveries of a discovery film) and her first love with José (Alberto Olmo), The director takes us on a certain journey through the ages of cinema.
In a sort of “summer tale” that does not hide its social, almost anthropological value, we find a common thread that runs through all those eras, that of cinema as an incessant means to evoke the invisible: ghosts, mirrors and simulacra.
From ancestral legends and popular beliefs about the cold drop and its devastating floods in southern Alicante, and how water always carries away a girl he falls in love with, a contemporary youth chronicle that is linked to tradition through a family of women only (also Ana’s mother and grandmother, played by Bárbara Lennie and Nieve de Medina) who carry a stigma.
The mythical substratum of an initiation story taken with the wrist risks not taking off and falling into redundancy, since it is not Waterfall seamless film. In any case, López Riera’s sensitivity in telling herself without doing it directly, starting from the local to build a universal story, and dissolving the tension between custom and legend, he shapes the images with his own poetics and personality, thus adding one of its most promising looks to Spanish cinema.
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