Afterwater (Dane Komljen, 2022) (Patreon)

A way-homer if ever there was one, Dane Komljen's second feature, commissioned by the Jeonju Cinema Project, is a bold film, a three-part tone poem about the natural world and human beings' place in it. I respect this film a great deal, even if I ultimately don't think Komljen really pulls it off. There is obviously a great deal of thought and theory behind Afterwater, which makes it all the more frustrating that, aside from a few very broad themes, its three parts don't hang together. Perhaps more frustrating still, they don't clash with or jostle against each other in especially productive ways. 

Let me offer two propositions before making my next judgment. First, it is great that Jeonju is now funding feature-length films, instead of the shorts triptychs of earlier years. Second, I think that if a film strikes me as being too long, that is very often an indication that my attention failed, rather than the film. Having said all that, I do think Afterwater would have worked much better as a short, and that's not just because my favorite film of Komljen's to date, Fantasy Sentences (2017), is also a short. It's more complicated than that.

The easiest way to explain Afterwater is to say that it adopts three different perspectives (none of them narratives, exactly) with respect to water. And each of the three sections features a different trio of performers, who exist before the camera more as dancers, or just bodies, than as characters per se. The first segment (shot in digital) starts by showing two people (Jonasz Hapka and Signe Westberg) studying species of aquatic plants. Soon, they are lying together by the side of a lake, frequently floating together on its surface. 

They are also seen reading from books, explaining that lakes are self-contained ecosystems and as such they are both singular and scientifically fascinating, in the sense that a specific number of species interact with each other, a kind of ecological control group. Almost imperceptibly, a third person (Boban Kaluder) makes his appearance. Alex Fields observes that the still camera and use of readers in nature recalls Straub, but by the end, Komljen's concentration on the lounging lovers, the plant life, the surface of the lake, and the play of water and light on skin, struck me as highly reminiscent of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Blissfully Yours in particular.

The second part is more discursive, with frequent descriptive voiceover. It is about a despondent priest (Ton Gras), who speaks of the lake as his greatest temptation, because he wants to succumb to death. We see him lying around, while two young people (Gorka Martin and Clàudia Robert) wander through the marsh, allowing insects to crawl on them as the sunlight skitters across the water's surface. In its choice of actors, costumes, movement, and overall tone, this part is very much in line with the new Italian lyricism of Pietro Marcello and Alba Rohrwacher. (The young man is even listed in the credits as Lázaro.) This section is shot in 16mm, and displays the grain and color temperature typically associated with that medium.

The final section, shot on fuzzy consumer grade video with visible scan lines, again features three performers (Rose-Anabel Beermann, Alice Heyward, and Orlando Rodriguez), all in flowy, androgynous tunics. They trudge through the water in super slow motion, calling to mind a sort of blotchy, sylvan rendition of Tsai Ming-liang's "Walker" films. In this section, Komljen clearly means for the muddiness of the video footage to mirror the performers' disintegrating subjecthood. They are not so much people as human animals, exhibiting an ecosexual attachment to the water, the trees, and the rocks. We see them licking a stump. We see them caress the bark of trees. And then, for some reason, they end up in what looks like the control room of a nuclear cooling tower. They regard the buttons and indicators with the same infantile eroticism as they did in the swamp. 

Oh, and also, there is constant onscreen text regarding the cosmic and the infinite, all instantiated in the palpable liquidity of the natural world. After all, we humans are mostly water, and so only the thin membranes of our organs separates us from a complete molecular communion with, well, the entire earth.

I understand that a work of art is not an expository paper. There is no reason to expect things to be conveyed as clearly as possible, because (a) the sensual aspects of the work of art are there, in part, to communicate what language cannot; and (b) by grappling with meanings that are implied but not overtly stated, we adjust our receptors into a more vulnerable mode, one in which logic can take a backseat and give precedence to affect and inchoate memory.

Having said that, Afterwater suffers because it tackles a subject (water and its place in the known universe) that is too broad to address in any meaningful way. This is a film whose parts bear only the slightest relationship to one another, probably because it is a film that could conceivably incorporate almost anything. The boundary of the text -- its inside and outside -- is literally porous. Again, I admire the big swing, but I just don't think Afterwater succeeds, at least on the terms it seems to have established. I'd love to know what I'm missing.