NYFF: The elegiac 'Alcarràs' mourns the moment at hand
Saturday, October 8, 2022 at 3:11PM
by Jason Adams
I never got to see my grandfather’s farm. The land was sold off and the barns and the stables were all torn down before I was born, all so a series of electricity transmission towers could be built across the middle of it. When I was a little kid my father and I would visit my grandparents small home perched astride where the farm used to be and my father would walk me out and point up at the towers in a field out behind their house, telling me how those towers stretched across the entire state. He always seemed proud, strangely in awe of them, as if those were our inheritance somehow. And I couldn’t stop thinking about those towers while watching Carla Simón’s melancholy and moving Alcarràs at NYFF this week.
This film, about peach farmers on the other side of the globe spending one last summer on the precipice of losing their home, land, and farm, seemed to be offering genuine insight into my own family and history...
Simón, as a director, is quite good at that. She already mined her personal history with the deeply lovely 2017 coming-of-age film Summer 1993, and made it feel universal. Here in her second film she returns to the autobiographical, although Alcarràs is ever-so-slightly more fictionalized, focusing on the Solé family who, you know, just happen to farm peaches in the exact same region where Simon’s family does the same.
The film effortlessly shifts focus among multiple members of the Solé clan (all of them played by non-professional actors) – there’s papa Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet), who we first meet in a bit of a rage because his father Rogelio (Josep Abad) doesn’t seem to have any documentation giving them ownership of their land. It turns out it’s been passed down generation after generation as a gentlemen’s agreement between two families, but now the youngest of the landowning Pinyol family doesn’t feel so gentlemanly anymore. Not when he can convert all of those useless peach trees into a cash-raking solar panel farm instead.
Pinyol offers the Solés the right to stay on the land – he’ll need people to upkeep the solar panels, after all. But you get the feeling if you pricked Quimet peach juice would spill forth, so at one is he with his legacy, with his father’s and grandfather’s. And he huffily rebuffs Pinyol's offer at once. Meanwhile his own children, a teenaged boy named Roger (Albert Bosch) and a girl named Mariona (Xènia Roset), seem restless and unsettled in their own ways – Roger is trying to impress his father and carry the legacy, all while they all see said legacy disappearing between their fingers, peach fuzz in the wind. A foundationless future yawns out before everyone.
But we watch the most of this unfold through the eyes of the youngest Solé, six-year-old Iris (Ainet Jounou), who can't quite grasp all of that. Iris' main concern is watching the spaces where she innocently played with her twin cousins being snatched away, one by one, until the only patch of earth left seems to be the front lawn. But as that inevitable future encroaches, as subtle as a fleet of bulldozers rumbling down the main path, the Solés each fly off into their own in little orbits. There are moments of pure joy still to be had across this final summer, ones which Simón renders with an unhurriedly luxurious gaze where you can feel the dirt, smell the food, sense the sun warm on your skin. But everyone seems to be looking for a past that’s been turned into light, into electricity, ungraspable and gone before you even knew what happened.
Alcarràs, Carla Simón, NYFF, Reviews, Spain
Reader Comments (3)
I am Spanish and normally I don't think the movie submitted by Spain has a chance - unless it is an Almodovar one - but this one, I think may get the Oscar. It's a vibe I feel... that it will totally blend with AMPAS.
A beautiful review for a beautiful film - as ever, thank you for sharing your writing with us. From the few Oscar submissions I've seen, I'm rooting for this and JOYLAND in the International Feature race. Considering what's been happening in Spain in the past few years, a nomination for a Catalan production would feel particularly special.
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