(courtesy IMP Awards)
Having your world blown apart is never an easy thing to handle, especially when that world has been formed over decades and generations and occupies a place in your heart and family lore that is woven into the fabric of who you are so deeply, strongly and intimately that having it torn from you feels like almost a violent death.
For all that of violent loss and sense of catastrophic displacement, many times that dissolution of what you know and love and your sense of place and identity happens not in an instant but over a period of time with each piece your loss falling into place one by one, the thud of their falling to the floor like a wound in your personal and your family’s collective soul.
The Golden Bear-awarded movie Alcarràs, co-written (with Arnau Vilaró) and directed by Carla Simón, captures this slowly momentous slide into loss of identity and home with a beautifully arresting sense of finality as a peach farming family in the western part of Catalonia face up to the fact that land they have farmed since the mid-twentieth century will no longer be theirs at the end of the summer.
Their orchards sit on land owned by a local land owning family, the latest generation of which has decided to forgo the gentleman’s agreement which allowed Quimet Solé’s (Jordi Pujol Dolcet) father and his successors to farm as if the land were their own and to resume the land so he can build a solar farm stretching to the horizon.
Quimet’s father Rogelio (Josep Abad) never signed any agreement, believing that the debt owed by the Pignol family to the Solés for hiding them during the Spanish Civil War when landowners were clearly marked as the enemy would be enough to keep the land as theirs for generations to come.
But times have changed and debts have paid, at least as far as the Pignols are concerned, and so Quimet, wife Dolors (Anna Otín), and their older teenage kids Roger (Albert Bosch) and Mariona (Xènia Roset) have no choice but to deal with the fact that once this summer’s harvest is over, so will their way of life.
Youngest daughter Iris (Ainet Jounou) is blissfully unaware that anything is wrong, content to play her games of spaceships and war with her cousins Pau and Pere Isaac Rovira and Joel Rovira respectively) and to treat life as if it will go on without interruption because when you’re a kid that’s precisely what you expect will happen.
(courtesy IMDb)
But Quimet, who doesn’t handle the end of things well at all, picking fights with members of the family until one day he breaks down when a pallet full of marketable peaches falls into the dirt – this shocks Roger and Mariona who have no idea what to do with a broken, vulnerable father, especially when he is usually an eccentric, force of opinionated nature – knows there is no going back from the loss of the orchards.
He, and siblings, Nati (Montse Oró) and Glòria (Berta Pipó), know that the end is nigh, as does Rogelio who, in one of the movie’s most touching scenes, spends the latter part of the night into the early dawn hours walking the rows of peach trees and quietly mourning what will soon be lost, and it’s harrowing watching how life goes on for the close extended family even as it is on an immutable path to being lost forever.
This is how worlds end and lives are changed forever, in a kind of feverishly nuanced slow motion where there is no choice but to get up and do what needs doing, all the while knowing that this is the last time these very ordinary things will be done.
While on the surface the family appear to have made their peace with what lies on the horizon for them, the truth fractures and tremors are everywhere in this tight-knit group.
Alcarràs is punctuated, in scenes which are both gently played and emotionally weighted and shocking, with instances of people cracking under the great stress which never stops, never relents and the counting clock of which never stops ticking over like some sort of homicidal grandfather clock counting the hours, minutes and seconds down to the end of everything.
How could you not lose it under the pressure?
So, it is that fights break out and parents yell at children and loving couple’s fractiously have goes at each other but at the heart of it, Alcarràs is all about how even in the midst of the loss of all they’ve known, and the attendant stressors wreaking havoc, this family is there for one another.
Quite what their new life will look like isn’t certain – though it will be different with only the house and its attendant gardens staying under their control – but suffice to say it will be draped in mourning for what they have lost, and like all grief, will take time to run its wildly impactful, unpredictable course.
Alcarràs is at its beautifully and simply but emotionally powerfully expressed heart, a profound rumination on what it means to be connected, to each other and to the land from which you draw meaning and purpose, and how you handle the transition to whatever beyond the loss of that.
It doesn’t provide easy answers nor a trite and glib ending with a gravity to proceedings that doesn’t let up for a moment but what it does do is speak to how things like family and love and connection do endure, bent and broken admittedly, and beset by forces well beyond their control, but still there and how even as the walls come crashing down, things will last beyond the destruction and they may turn out to be the most important things of all in the long-run.
For now though, there is mourning and loss and change and in the midst of it the Solé family who form the beating heart of Alcarràs and a story that speaks to the endurance of the human spirit, often beyond the very things that gave it sustenance in the first place.