Marea Alta (2020)

Really enjoyed this, but it's one of those which I perceive might not be for everyone, and what was extremely prickly for me, could be almost stultifying for others. 

 

 

I'm fond of saying that some of my favourite novels are those which would be extremely hard to turn into movies, and the reverse is also true. Anyone with only Verónica Chen's screenplay to hand would likely make a very different film to the one she made - for the silences work hard here and one of the most interesting things about her storytelling in Marea Alta/High Tide is the way she shows us things without explicit comment or explanation, techniques that are hard for any author to achieve so effectively.

I liked the way it opened, cutting straight to the chase, so to speak, making the audience thirsty for the context, some of which is either added later or needs to be intuited. The way the narrative works on you is going to be subjective, inevitably. It's 'about' class, race and gender, but not in the most obvious, accountable ways.

Laura is an artist, yet inhabits a second home on the coast which is an absolute nullity from a taste perspective. it's low season in Mar de las Pampas, in Buenos Aires province, a location where those pines that always tend to appear in violent films run right up to the shore. She's there to work, but also to oversee a small construction project being undertaken by a contractor called Weisman and his two Guarani workers.

Laura and Weisman go to bed together, in a series of scenes where the dynamics are immediately a bit uncomfortable. It ends with her saying she will call in a way he finds dismissive, but then HE doesn't call or indeed turn up the next day and she is left to try to impose some sort of increasingly leaky authority over 'Hueso' and Toto who find ever more creative ways to test and then violate the boundaries.

I found this in Netflix's 'Understated Spanish-language films bucket. The most understated thing about it, other than the aforementioned silent scenes and the interior design, is the violence, and this is, in the end, an extremely violent film, but you may not be quite so aware of this in the moment , as you would be during the course of more well-trodden Halloween-week programming. Nor, I can assure you, is it the violence you might have anticipated.

One thing did make me ponder: the rather haphazard tattoos on Laura's body. Do these appear as a coincidence deriving from the casting of Gloria Carrá, or are they an additional element of Chen's storytelling? The actress was forty nine when the movie was shot and I imagined that the director might have been using these ink drawings to encourage us to imagine what sort of person Laura had been at a younger age, prior to marriage and children, and the shade of this earlier presence seemed to me to feed into the thematic murkiness with regards to social and gender interactions.