Alcarràs (Carla Simón, 2022) (Patreon)

An underwhelming Golden Bear winner from a less-than-stellar competition, Alcarràs feels very much like a compromise vote. There is nothing terribly wrong with Carla Simón's sophomore feature, but it is rather undistinguished, a broadly based piece of family portraiture that takes place at a moment of crisis and transition. We observe three generations of the Solé clan, rural farmers who are losing their land to its original owner, who plans to destroy the Solés' peach orchard and create a solar panel "farm." While the grandfather (Josep Abad) is pained by the loss of his familial keep, he also seems exhausted, like he is not really interested in fighting against so-called progress. His son Quimet (Jordi Pujol), the boss of the orchard, is the one bitterest about losing his livelihood and his primary identity.

As you can tell from what I've written above, Alcarràs is merely the latest example of center-left protest cinema, lodging a complaint in favor of the old ways in the face of neoliberal capital. While Simón takes care to show the organized farmers, including Quimet and his sone Roger (Albert Bosch), at rallies protesting the fruit buyers' shitty subsistence pricing, the film has a somewhat conservative undercurrent, defending tradition for its own sake rather than articulating a systematic argument against the transformation of the landscape.

It also doesn't help Simón's case that Quimet is a raging asshole. A brutish, sexist patriarch, he spends most of his time picking peaches, but makes sure to scream at his kids for playing "too loud" or "in the wrong place." He upbraids Roger endlessly, even when he succeeds in furthering his father's cause. ("You should focus on school," he barks.) He destroys Roger's small marijuana crop, either out of spite or bourgeois moralism. And he goes to war with his brother-in-law (Carles Cabós) who, seeing the writing on the wall, leaves the farm and gets a job with the solar panel company. 

Most of those who have praised Alcarràs have mentioned how Simón manages to divide her attention across the various family members, even suggesting a kind of Altmanesque democracy of vision. It's true that, for example, Simón spends more time watching the children's imaginary games than a more straightforward film might've done. And we do spend a fair amount of time with the women of the family, in particular Quimet's bitter but devoted wife Dolors (Anna Otin) and their oldest daughter Mariona (Xènia Roset), whose adolescence is coming to and end and finds the development of her identity stymied by ostensibly larger family concerns.

Nothing is really noteworthy about Alcarràs as a work of cinema. In fact, it participates in a trend that I thought had run its course: using the audiovisual language associated with realism to (presumably) lend credibility and heft to what is basically a very deterministic, writerly allegory. It would be wrong to suggest that Carla Simón is a Spanish Ken Loach, because despite his faults, Loach almost always manages to hit upon some moments of startling, elemental humanity. Not so Alcarràs, which begins with the announcement that the orchard is doomed, charts the family's unsurprising responses to this crisis, and ends with the excavators coming down.

No, Alcarràs actually has much more in common with the middling, instantly forgotten independent films that Javier Bardem tends to make, like Mondays in the Sun and The Good Boss, films that occupy that Loach / Guédiguian zone of affable, nonthreatening liberalism that ruefully observes as little people are crushed by industrialization, austerity, the gig economy, or what have you. These films seldom suggest that any other future is possible, so they are really just asking the viewer (whose class identity the filmmakers have already assumed) to spare a thought for global capitalism's human redundancies. They ask us to feel bad, but to feel good about the fact that we did.