Categories: Reviews

Criticism of ‘El agua’, the will and the feminine desire

Drama about adolescence and rural life directed by Elena López Riera and starring Luna Pamiés, Bárbara Lennie, Nieve de Medina and Alberto Olmo.

    Far from the restraint and restraint that usually prevail in first films, the Valencian Elena López Riera debuts in the feature film without giving up the overflowing lyricism of her latest short films, ‘Las viscera’ (2016) and ‘Those who wish’ (2018), where the real is twinned with the fictional to illuminate a clash between the old and the new. In ‘El agua’, youth is put by Ana, the protagonist (performed with vigor and mystery by Luna Pamiés), who longs for both love and escape from a reality, that of today’s Spain, which offers her no paths to fulfillment or prosperity. On her part, the past manifests itself in an esoteric network of family curses and mystical forces, which come together in the local legend of a bride who was abducted by the river.

    Clinging to the cultural splendor of her land and touched by the spell of an indomitable nature, López Riera briskly blends romantic drama, folklore and ethnography (with echoes of Jean Renoir and Apichatpong Weerasethakul) to illustrate a world in which the female will and desire struggle to find their way between tradition and social order.

    To prove that social cinema can be intensely poetic

    The best: the intersection of reality and fiction.

    DATA SHEET

    Address: Elena Lopez Rivera Distribution: Luna Pamiés, Bárbara Lennie, Nieve de Medina, Alberto Olmo Country: Spain Year: 2022 Release date: 04–11-2022 Gender: Drama Script: Philippe Azoury, Elena Lopez Riera Duration: 104 minutes

    Synopsis: It is summer in a small town in the southeast of Spain. A storm threatens to overflow the river that runs through it again. An old popular belief affirms that some women are predestined to disappear with each new flood because they have “the water inside”. Ana lives with her mother and her grandmother in a house that the rest of the town looks at with suspicion. In the midst of the electric atmosphere that precedes the rain, Ana meets José while fighting to throw away the ghosts.


    Source: Fotogramas