DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT – For his first feature film, Water, director Elena López Riera delves into the legacy of a legend affecting the women of a Spanish village. A river overflowing with love, three generations and a burning passion wrapped in powerful lyricism.
From time immemorial, through the mythologies, water is an inseparable element of the feminine. Nymphs, mermaids, the symbolism of motherhood… Rare are the films that manage to approach all these metaphors so subtly, here linked to liquid, without losing the thread of its narration. The scenario ofWater, co-written by the filmmaker and Philippe Azoury (who also makes an appearance there as an actor), sets out to tell the time of a summer, the ancestral legend of the village where Elena López Riera is from, Orihuela. Documentary sequences in static shots intersect the fiction in the form of interviews with women developing lived or heard stories regarding this mysterious myth. That of a river falling in love with young girls, interfering in them to retain them if they have the misfortune to want to live a story with someone other than him. The anger of the watercourse then turns into a powerful flood, threatening to carry the village away in its path and to make the women who are crossed by this water disappear.
More Water, it is first of all the story of Ana (disturbing Luna Pamies), a young girl living a summer like any other surrounded by her friends, dancing all night long and lazing on the edges of the bank in the oppressive heat. She lives with her grandmother and her mother, the owner of a café where you never see a customer, which breathes a strange atmosphere into this house, which is home to three generations of women who carry within them the heritage of curse according to the villagers. When Jose returns to the village, the attraction between him and Ana seems obvious. Bodies come together aflame with desire and they experience the beginnings of a story even as his mother experiences a teenage first love once more. In her staging, the director plays with this opposition of elements where the fire of passion and summer flares up, the storm and the water prepare to descend. Something organic emanates from it, seizing our senses. Through this prism of the prime of life where the question arises of escaping from the place in which one grows up, Elena López Riera captures in each shot the invisible danger lurking around young people in a first feminist feature film from a impressive mastery.
