The crime is never shown, nor explicitly detailed, in “When a River Becomes the Sea,” Catalan director Pere Vilà Barceló‘s quiet, contemplative but cumulatively hard-hitting portrait of a young woman reassembling herself after a sexual assault. It certainly doesn’t need to be. Taking their protagonist, archaeology student Gaia, at her word and inviting the viewer to do the same, Barceló and co-writer Laura Merino vividly and empathetically enter the mind of a victim struggling to be heard even when she is believed, in a culture where women in her position are still judged and dismissed across lines of gender and generational difference.
As a study of psychological collapse and rebuilding, the film is no easy sit, though it becomes, gradually, a rewarding one. Avoiding pat therapy-speak or a neatly cathartic narrative arc, it instead charts the jagged, irregular rhythms of trauma, closely following Gaia as she pivots between volatile anger, numb withdrawal and a tentative reclamation of her life. Simply and candidly presented, and carried by Claud Hernández’s alternately combative and fragile lead performance, this Karlovy Vary competition entry (Barceló’s second at the festival, 13 years after “La lapidation de Saint Etienne”) could resonate forcefully with viewers across a range of ages, backgrounds and experiences of gender-based violence — though a three-hour running time may curb its arthouse distribution prospects.
Which isn’t to say the film is overlong. Indeed, its scale and sprawl feel sensitively suited to a story expressly about the wearying duration and day-by-day pace of the recovery process, as well as a pointed rejoinder to industry conventions regarding which stories generally get to take up this much space. Titled after a blunt but effective running metaphor for social integration from a state of isolation, “When a River Becomes the Sea” sets out to be an imposing and even testing work, but it’s also an emotionally involving one — warmed by the intimately drawn relationship between Gaia and her desperately aggrieved single father, beautifully played by Alex Brendemühl.
Gaia is introduced first as a shadow — cast diffidently across coastal rocks in bright sunlight, as the chatter of birds fills the soundtrack — before we cut to her stricken, quivering face, held in tight, searching closeup from a high angle by DP Ciril Barba, and written across with confused torment. As we’ll soon learn, she’s been recently raped by Diego (never seen), a boyfriend she’s known from childhood, and suddenly a brutal stranger to her. Questioned by her father, who’s immediately concerned by her shellshocked demeanor, she’s unable to answer. “In a relationship there are good days and bad days,” he counsels hopefully, though he already seems to know the inadequacy of this advice.
Gaia may love her father, but in her wounded state, she can’t quite open up to him. It’s finally to one of her university professors, kindly archaeologist Gemma (Laia Marull), that she explains what happened with Diego — while it takes Gemma to gently confirm to her that what she experienced was not just bad sex but sexual assault. The script is delicately attuned to the ways in which experiences like Gaia’s can be minimized or miscategorized by authority figures seeking to simplify a fraught situation, but putting the correct name on her pain doesn’t make it any easier to process. Gaia may have allies in Gemma and her father — less so, it emerges, in friends still connected with Diego, who would rather she drop the whole thing — but her anguish can’t be shared or transferred. One person’s PTSD, however attentively diagnosed and supported, remains a lonely path to navigate.
Barceló conveys that truth by keeping the focus on Gaia at her most private moments — group therapy sessions and court proceedings are kept strenuously off-screen — or in one-to-one dialogue scenes that range from openly confessional to confrontational to, on rare occasions, fleetingly convivial. Much of the drama is contained in the cramped house she shares with her father, whose own fiercely protective instincts — as he takes extended time off work to monitor his daughter — clash harshly with her suffocated need for space. A devastatingly twinned pair of scenes, each playing out for different reasons in pitch darkness, contrast the most abrasive, dangerous fallout of that tension with a tender retreat into mutual parent-child dependency.
Whether tautly clammed up or releasing herself into strident, full-body fury, Hernández’s performance is the film’s compelling, tensely unpredictable center — balanced and anchored by Brendemühl’s frayed, weary underplaying, as a father trying, with only sporadic success, to hold it all together. Not a message movie or afterschool special, “When a River Becomes the Sea” offers no prescriptive advice for victims or their loved ones in this worst of scenarios — just an honest portrayal of the ups and downs and agonizing stasis of trauma, and the hard work of living through it.