Alcarràs Review: A Richly Detailed, If Unforceful, Portrait of a Dying Way of Life

Traditional agricultural ways of life are in trouble around the world. In Spain, the global trend of corporate consolidation is dovetailing with the tepid neoliberal response to global warming, and as captured by Alcarràs, it’s leading to farmers losing their livelihood. Carla Simón’s follow-up to Summer 1993 features a cast of non-professional actors drawn from the rural area where the story takes place. It’s one neorealist gesture in a film that might have benefited from adopting a few more—particularly that cinematic movement’s clarity of action. While Alcarràs excels at building a convincing milieu, it lacks the strong sense of tension and moral urgency that its story would seem to demand.

Simón coaxes strikingly naturalistic performances from her cast, in particular the trio of young children whose characters serve as the story’s focal points in the film’s most engrossing scenes. Iris (Ainet Jounou) and her twin cousins, Pere and Pau (Joel and Isaac Rovira), spend their time goofing around her father Quimet’s (Jordi Pujol Dolcet) peach orchard, from making harvesting baskets into forts to pretending that the old car by the reservoir is a spaceship. Simón begins Alcarràs in that space of childhood fantasy, only to have it broken by the reality of the backhoe that arrives to clear the land and make way for a solar farm.

As is gradually revealed between the world-building moments that comprise much of the early stretches of the film, the actual landowner, Pinyol (Jacob Diarte), has sold the land that Quimet’s family has been farming since the Spanish Civil War to speculators and clean-energy startups. The artificially low price of produce has been driving many local landowners to do the same. While Quimet’s brother-in-law, Cisco (Carles Cabós), has joined forces with these powers that be, helping to facilitate the installment of the solar panels, Quimet and the multigenerational portion of the family that still works the land have committed themselves to a bigger harvest this year, and defiantly join in local protests against farming conditions.

Rounding out the principal characters are Quimet’s wife, Dolors (Anna Otín); their teenage children, Mariona (Xènia Roset) and Roger (Albert Bosch); and the man’s father, Rogelio (Josep Abad). Each has a distinct presence: Rogelio is the kind and wistful grandfather, while Dolors is the unflappable mother who attempts to keep everyone on stable ground as they cope with the stress of losing the farm. But it’s the teens that have the most pronounced, if not always elegantly illustrated, character arcs. Nursing a rebellious streak that’s most clearly exemplified by his secret marijuana garden, Roger alternates between duly performing his duties and sullenly rejecting them. Meanwhile, Mariona and her friends are choreographing a hip-hop-style dance for the local town festival, which is situated as a kind of coming-of-age ritual.

Each of the film’s characters feels fully lived in, as does the family dynamic that shapes them. As the burly, perpetually stressed patriarch, Dolcet in particular conveys a palpable sense of the physical and psychological effects of working the land for decades, as well as Quimet’s disquiet over knowing that his family’s world is about to come to an abrupt end. Elsewhere, Mariona and Roger’s teen anguish never feels forced, and Iris’s encounters with life-and-death matters in both play and reality constitute Alcarràs’s most affecting through line.

These subplots, though, weave in and out of the story with scant momentum. The feeling of stasis where there should be crisis—after all, a family’s livelihood is at stake here—partially stems from cinematographer Daniela Cajías’s rather monotonous camerawork, which often follows the characters tightly in medium close-up, rarely giving us establishing views that would have provided more dynamism and a sense of space to the proceedings. And, given the narrative’s ambulatory exploration of the characters’ different worlds, the encroachment of big capital on the family’s way of life doesn’t possess the kind of accumulating force that would give the culmination of the various threads a deep emotional impact.

Despite its inability to weave its threads into a harrowing neorealist knot, Alcarràs crafts a detailed portrait of a specific and endangered lifestyle. As a tribute to farmers’ way of life, its effective and at times moving, but as an exposé of the potential losses that a business-centric green revolution is in the process of incurring, it wants for a stiffer punch. Inadvertently, it leaves one wondering whether a documentary would have harvested better material.