It’s summertime. The glowing sun is out, and the air is calm. It’s the perfect excuse to take a swim or lie still on the grass and wonder about what’s next in your life. It’s certainly the case, or at least initially, for a group of working-class teenagers in Ion de Sosa’s latest fiction feature Balearic, which finds them trespassing on a beautiful yet empty mansion with a big pool. When the group decides to stay for a dip, the sun-drenched fantasy tersely turns into a shocking ordeal as a pack of black hounds (obviously an allusion to Cerberus in Greek mythology) storms the property and brutally attacks one of them. Trapped in the water, they scream in terror. It’s a strong setup for a proper thriller, only for the director to cut to the other half of his bifurcated narrative, which involves a group of wealthy adults pitching up at a neighboring luxury villa to welcome Saint John’s Eve and try to find bliss, despite a wildfire that’s slowly encroaching their surroundings.
Balearic, it turns out, is a philosophical drama with an absurdist register, and not a very good one. It works if you’re among audiences who no longer have the bandwidth for marathon movies, and that’s typically not a great barometer. Shot on 16mm, De Sosa, alongside cinematographer Cris Neira, steeps the film in a vibrant visual palette, and what results is some shrewdly realized imagery: obscured and distorted faces in conversation, a bloodied shower, a balloon that reveals deep-seated secrets, a paella pan marked with the faces of the troubled teens, etc. The effect is surely visceral and impressive, but it eventually loses its power chiefly because the film lacks emotional heft. There is hardly a character you can truly latch on. I also don’t think the structure works.
The eponymous Mediterranean island, though rendered by the film as more imagined than real, gives the narrative some sort of mythical allure, with Yago Cordero and Iosu González’s stunning soundscape homing in on this atmosphere. De Sosa readily suggests something is wrong in this escapist terrain; if it reminds you of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest and the gripping manner in which it interrogates the implications of spatial and political proximity, that’s because it’s one of the filmmaker’s points of reference. In the most obvious reading, the film gestures toward a commentary on privilege and class politics. The group of adults—one of whom is the father of one of the terrified adolescents—eat, talk nonsense over cocktails, and lounge around the villa’s pool, which none of them are willing to submerge in, as if it will kill them. And despite the celebration, these people are really depressed and truly selfish people. They keep secrets from, and act a certain way in front of, each other. They are so afraid of death and old age, but are only concerned with their own pleasure. It’s not that they’re simply oblivious of what is happening around them, it’s more to do with the fact that they actively ignore it.
Which is to say that Balearic, above anything, is a movie about the consequences of hedonism in both psychological and ethical terms. This philosophical assertion is deftly captured in a scene near the film’s end, in which the wealthy group blissfully drinks and parties to blaring techno music, as the ashes of the wildfire that continues to ravage the island in the distance shower them. “Let’s finish off the decanter before the fire melts the ice,” one man says casually. “It feels like Christmas!” a woman declares. It’s a stark and striking image that not just enunciates that movie’s whole point but also instantly calls to mind the unsettling footage of Israelis partying and celebrating in Tel Aviv amid its Zionist government’s live-streamed genocide and total erasure of the Palestinian people. I don’t think the resemblance is mere coincidence, but the rest of the movie’s symbolism and visual flourishes kneecap the sheer power of its vision. If anything, De Sosa resorts to symbolism to paper over his directorial imprecisions and lack of narrative texture. What remains are philosophical ambitions held back by a weak dramatic infrastructure.
Balearic recently screened at the Locarno Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Locarno site for the title.
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