Memories can be slippery things. Take what happens around the halfway point of Laurynas Bareiša’s beguiling second feature: two women––more specifically Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė) and Juste (Agnė Kaktaitė), sisters on holiday with their respective families (a husband each, one son and one daughter, respectively)––start dancing to Donna Lewis with what looks like an old routine, part half-remembered movements, part muscle memory. This entrancing sequence is cut short when their kids ask to go swimming, but one of the children appears to drown. The film then jumps forward in time, where Ernesta is visiting a man whose life was saved by one of her late husband’s organs. Before finding out how he died, we jump back again: same holiday, same sisters, same dance, only this time it’s Lighthouse Family. “When you’re close to tears, remember,“ Tunde Baiyewu sings, “someday it’ll all be over.“
The Lithuanian film’s title is Drowning Dry, a term used in the medical profession to describe the unlucky fate of surviving an initial plunge only for the vocal cords to spasm, cutting off air from the lungs. Speaking in Locarno this week, where the film premiered, Bareiša said the “irregular repetition” this condition provokes inspired his story’s fragmented structure. He also, somewhat less abstractly, confirmed that Drowning Dry, much like his previous film Pilgrims (winner of the Orrizonti award in Venice in 2021), is about trauma. That’s a word that gets used a lot in festival programs these days, but Bareiša’s is a singular work: conceptually rich in its design and ideas, beautifully shot in its own evasive way, even cruelly funny.
That day in Locarno began with a screening of Kurdwin Ayub’s Mond, a film about an Austrian MMA fighter who is hired to train the daughters of a wealthy Jordanian family. Drowning began directly afterward, making its near-identical opening sequence––another bloodied fighter nearing the end of a bout in some version of the UFC’s Octagon––almost jarring. The fighter this time is Ernesta’s husband, Lukas (Paulius Markevičius), who wins his tournament only to sit backstage in the aftermath with a crying Ernesta. Bareiša peppers the opening sequences with similarly worrying red flags. The most direct comes as the families make their way to the sisters’ inherited holiday home, where Juste’s husband, Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), makes a dangerous maneuver on the road which Lukas attempts to copy. It’s the kind of performative male peacocking Ruben Östlund tends to use as catalyst for satire. Bareiša presents it as a breadcrumb trail to tragedy.
That sequence is the most bracing moment in a film built on more subtly unnerving imagery––shot by the director himself. The actor’s faces are barely seen in Drowning Dry, let alone in close-up. Instead, much like in a memory, the characters move through medium shots in half-lit rooms, their faces either turned away from camera or cast in shadow. The accumulative effect is that of a person (or persons) attempting to reassemble an awful puzzle, yet somehow the film never succumbs to despair. Wrought emotions are largely shooed away with sisterly strength, philosophical acceptance, or attractive flourishes of gallows humor. Bareiša’s attractive sophomore feature is wrestling with the weightiest topics imaginable, but this is a director who knows when to come up for air.
Drowning Dry premiered at the Locarno Film Festival.
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