InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 1

FILM REVIEWS
ALCARRÀS
Carla Simón
From the first frame of Alcarràs, Carla Simón alerts the viewer to
the integrality of the summery Catalonian landscape of her film.
Within these windswept fields and misshapen buttes resides the
Solé family, modest peach farmers — partially based on the
director’s own family — and played by a rugged cast of
nonprofessionals. The vantage point of childhood often mingles
with realism in Simón’s work, with the still-present undercurrents
of the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War lending a subtle
historicity. Alcarràs hinges on the Solé family being evicted from
their peach farm, which was given to them as a reward from the
wealthy Pinyol clan, after offering their protection during the
war; these sorts of displays of gratitude, enacted through any
formal paperwork, are unfortunately archaic in the film’s present
day.
The conflict, however earth-shattering it may read, is also
somewhat ancillary, encouraging the viewer to map out the ebb
and flow of relationships of this extended family rather than
anticipate their final displacement. Modernity has its harbinger
in an unwelcome, monstrous tractor crane in the opening shots
— interrupting the play of the smaller children, whose reaction
shots from behind a car’s windshield seal the Lucrecia Martel
influence then and there — but work still has to continue,
regardless of encroaching industrialization and the threat of
deposition. The arbiters of change offer an alternative, and even
if it is lucrative, it doesn’t account for the loss of an
intergenerational home.
The eviction is sinuous; it doesn’t buffet the family as much as it
lies in wait. So in the meantime, Simón catalogs and files the
quotidian activities of a peach farm maintained by the various
generations of a single family. Daniel Cajítas’ camera often
begins at the center of a permutation of the ensemble, before
casually attaching itself to a certain party, the latent isolation
registered by quiet observation of larger events. More than once,
teenagers, children, and the elderly will make their way out to the
crop, standing alone amidst what’s provided for them for so long,
and what may be soon repossessed. In some ways, Alcarràs
resembles Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours, or at least a proletariat
transposition, especially in the party scene near the end, where
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