The female body as a throwing weapon in the cinema it comes from afar and has inspired many archetypes in different genres. Beyond terror, there does not have to be a graphic and explicit component of darkness to represent the violence with which society charges against the female form, coloring it with powers over the other that cloud the mind and poison desire.
As if it were a film noir “femme fatale”, the director and screenwriter Elena Lopez Rivera recovers in his first film, ‘Water‘, the cursed social legacy inherited from generation to generation, passed down from mothers to daughters, which lives in the skin of women as a symbol of male violence in patriarchal society.
With a naturalistic gaze, López Riera dwells on his feature debut, which can be seen in Spanish cinemas from next November 4th after passing through the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival, to decipher the “love-hate” relationship with water in his hometown, Orihuelain the Alicante region of Vega Baja, where there have been many times that the neighborhood has lost everything with floods when the flow of the Segura overflows.
The film, which has a documentary component in which the plot is strongly rooted to show, for example, the destruction of the last great flood of 2019, also turns towards the fantastic, specifically towards magical realism, to unite the running of that water the destiny with which the locals mark a generation of women, weighed down by an image of lead astray those who approach them.
“The water comes because the river falls in love with a woman and, since it can’t have her, it drags her away,” a resident of Orihuela is heard saying in the footage of ‘El agua’ about the magical attraction that the river has in this universe towards women. Using the character of a bored teenager who does not leave her town during the summer, played by the newcomer Moon Pamiesthe label of violence inherited from Ana is exposed, descendant of a woman who, on her wedding day, the river drags with her to the depths.
Ana is the faithful reflection, involuntary, of inheritance by obligation: her grandmother Ángela (with Nieve de Medina playing the character), for example, is a woman who suffered violence from her husband until the day she died and that represents, by the rituals that she performs, the archetype of the witch; Ana’s mother (Bárbara Lennie), for her part, presents herself as a woman adrift who doesn’t seem to have done anything productive and who runs a bar that is sinking even more every day. Thus, Ana fights to free herself from the weight of tradition and be able to choose which path she walks on and with whom she does so.
Riera’s wager, who also co-writes the script for his feature debut with Philippe Azoury —who also has a small role in the film—, defends an arc of transformation of the character towards liberation through confrontation and not towards martyrdom or catharsis of a tragic ending, as in ‘coven‘the production directed by Pablo Agueroin which despite the brotherhood that is shown among the girls of the village they end up being condemned by the male gaze that, while wanting them, fears them too.
“I am that woman, but there was no need to count on me to fear. Now I will tell my story,” the protagonist of ‘El agua’ can be heard saying to the camera at one point in the film, fighting precisely what they say in the her town. In a veiled way, despite being a naturalistic portrait that is intermingled with the documentary, López Riera revisits in her first film, as if it were a sociological study, the myth of the witch as the incarnation of evil and sinwhich seems to even have power over the elements.
If in the seventeenth century the women who tried to be free fell when they ran into the Inquisition, in this story, which also seeks to survive the passage of time orally and through a female voice; now the daughters of the witches appropriate their evil label to resignify the myth and use it to remove the others.
The movie ‘She Will’, by Charlotte Colbert, available on filmin, addresses precisely a similar story of empowerment of the protagonist by recognizing and deciding to wallow against violence. In this plot, a movie star takes refuge to recover from a double mastectomy in a remote place in Scotland where many women were burned in the past for practicing, supposedly.
Once there, Veronica allies herself with the wisdom of the land of that enclave to also liquidate the trauma she experienced as a child, when she coincided in the movie that launched her to stardom with a veteran actor who abused her. Again, magical realism banishes here an army of silenced voices that, channeling themselves through the main character, find their revenge against the patriarchal power, at the same time that they nourish their messenger with strength and wrap her in her trance.
The result is a powerful film in which, as in ‘El agua’, the opponent is not allowed to set his trap again to impose a decisive point that serves as a stop on the path of the violence experienced. In line with ‘El agua’, which is quite unique as far as the documentary vision is concerned, it is not necessary to go to the purely fantastic, however, to find similar heroines who revolt against the hegemonic discourse of society on perversion in female thought.
The power of female sexuality as a conscious weapon becomes the main conversation of ‘The Love Witch‘the feature film Anna Miller. Elaine, the protagonist of it, is a witch “addicted to love” who reverses the sexist of many previous films, also rejoicing in a kind of “femme fatale” reinvented, from an aesthetic of perfection and relegated to the past.
For its part, in a world in which the Internet and social networks already play an additional role in the revictimization of women within society as a “poisoned apple” to be purged, the feature film ‘Assassination Nation’ of Sam Levinson (the creator of ‘Euphoria’), is also satirical by practically turning into action heroines some teenage girls who, first, have been subdued by the silent violence of the man and then, the target of the more explicit revenge of the aggressors.
have the water inside
Elena López Riera, who has shot all her short films in her native Orihuela, is working on ‘El agua’ with a concept that scares the women of the town: the call of the river, feeling attracted by the water. In a world in which making a film “without counting all the violence that still exists” would have been to avoid it, as the director commented in a discussion after the preview of the film at the Madrid Film Academy, during the casting for this production asked many women what it was for them to have the water inside.
“Most of the women answered something, nobody said: I don’t know what it’s like to have water inside,” Riera said about it. “It is a very powerful image related to mythology,” she said in relation to this metaphor the screenwriter. “There were all kinds of explanations: from sexual representations to, in the vast majority and depending on the age group, but especially in older women, they spoke of having had it many times. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s something that doesn’t let you breathe,’ they said. This is strong and you say: Hostia, well we’re screwed”he concluded.
Even so, the voices of the new generations that sing that “I am that mother, that daughter” that is heard in the film mark the step of what could be the future. “The world belongs to them”Elena López Riera has also said hopefully.