Yesterday, I did something I’ve never done before. I went to the cinema in the afternoon, on my own. At least I can’t remember having done this before, but now a vague memory is whispering that this is not true and that many years ago, when I lived in Mainz in Germany, I fled a bad day in a film that I could only half understand with my then mediocre German. I was trapped in a live-in job as an au pair, detested the work and resented the family (or was it the other way round). It was the era before mobile phones and the Eurozone, and I had to save up my D-marks and pfennige to make rare calls home. I remember the coins being swallowed by the coin slot and hearing the beep-beep-beep beeeeeep when my time was up and I was cut out mid-weep. My poor parents.
Where was I …
At the cinema. A spontaneous trip to see Alcarràs, a film made by Carla Simón, set in rural Catalonia and made in the Catalan language. It’s summer and we meet various members of the peach-farming Solé family, whose ancestral link with the land is at risk of being severed. Their landlord has plans to reinvent the peach plantation as a more lucrative solar farm. The subject is close to the director’s heart. She knows how tough such a life can be – two of her uncles run peach farms in the same region.
The film is about the connections and disconnections that each family member experiences with the land and each other. It’s about the bonds and imperfections of family and community. Made amongst the trees which are under threat of being ripped out, you can hear the rustle of their leaves when a character brushes by. You can feel the sun-baked heat rise from the earth, and you even think you can smell the fruit ripen – almost, but not quite.
I nearly drifted off to sleep at one point – not because the movie lacks narrative, but because it sucks you into its real-time tempo and you feel like the summer might go on forever.
There are unobvious metaphors, unspoken scenes, and unaccompanied songs that are handed down the generations. There is laughter and daftness, anger and desperation, tenderness and brutality. And there are real, relatable people – none of the actors is professional. Carla Simón and her team visited villages in the Alcarràs area and interviewed thousands of locals to build their cast.
I’ll leave the superlatives (this film has won many awards) to those who write proper reviews. But when the film finished at my local cinema, no one in the eight-strong audience was in a hurry to leave. The credits rolled and the lights came on. Only then was it time to go. And as I walked home I didn’t listen to the podcast that I’d planned to play. I just wanted to bask in the light-touch wisdom of Carla Simón’s film and think about the questions she raises, but doesn’t try to answer.
The single photo I took to record my solo trip (at the top) was right after a woman in the row behind me admonished my neighbour for having his phone on (the film hadn’t yet begun). She bore the superior tone of an old-school headmistress. So I turned on my phone, knowing she’d see, and snapped a shot – of nothing much, but that didn’t matter.
The photos below are of another peach-farming area, in Andalucía, its melocotones amarillos, and the reason for my cinema trip. I had been thinking about Israel the peach farmer, and wanted to find out how good his ‘buena vida‘ really was. Below these photos is the Alcarràs trailer.
Summer 1993, Carla Simón’s début film, also offers a loving yet painful, lingering view of life in Catalonia. Based on Simón’s own childhood it has one of the best endings I’ve seen in a while.
Have Paprika, Will Travel 