Fruits of their labour

Carla Simón’s presentiments of loss and modernisation in Alcarràs

Image: Wonder Pictures

Contains mild spoilers

After an illustrious premiere circuit across Europe and North America, Carla Simón’s Alcarràs made its Australian debut at the Sydney Film Festival in June.

Winner of the 2022 Berlinale Golden Bear award, the film is named after Simón’s peach-growing home municipality of Alcarràs in Catalonia, the cast comprises only local, non-professional actors, imbuing the film with a credibility that would have been lost on a more artificial ensemble. Alcarràs focuses on the Solé family: rural farmers, compelled to surrender to modernisation’s demands.

The threat of eviction — the film’s conceit — looms over all generations of the family. The elderly patriarch, Rogelio Solé, fails to adduce written evidence of an agreement between him and his wealthy Pinyol counterpart: a pact to reside on and farm their peach lands in return for sheltering the Pinyols during the Spanish Civil War. Sitting under an immense fig tree planted by the elders of the respective clans, Rogelio fails to comprehend how the death of the senior Pinyol should eradicate that promise — as the inheritors of his estate seek to destroy the peach trees and install a solar farm instead. It is an antiquated sentiment in a reliquary of spoken agreements; a benediction of blood and soil which in the absence of a written contract is rendered inane, inert, empty.

While the plot wanes and occasionally confuses with its extensive ensemble cast, the cinematography arrests and dazzles. Youth is untethered in the film, as Simón depicts a generation whose inheritance slowly bleeds away beneath them, a microcosmic frame of the greater climate crisis. A shot of Rogelio’s grandson, Roger, running through a tunnel of green leaves in a blood-red basketball tank is striking — like a matador running from an unremitting bull, chasing a future which increasingly dissipates. His father, Quimet, has debilitating back pain from years of labour. A frame captures both his wife, Dolors, attending to his pains with remedial massage, and his infant daughter Iris watching on despondently in the mirror's reflection. The generations combine into a gestalt of foreboding unease. A distinct lack of aerial shots over the landscape renders the camera earthbound. In its lack of sequential narrative and focus on disparate familial sub-plots, the film takes a concurrency redolent of documentary rather than fiction — Simón mobilising her local cast to humanise, rather than fictionalise, the issues which she represents.

As the film reaches past two hours in length, the vacillation between the ensemble plots gives us the hope that this is simply a vignette of a family’s summer lives and not the death knell of their livelihoods. The sheer length of the film seems to be a clue that we will be rewarded with a favourable ending: a gift for enduring through a plot of devastating lows and exalted highs. The summer ends as the family feast on the last peaches and figs of the season, the final bounties of their land.

Fig trees occupy a varied and florid place in cultural conception: ancient Greek fertility rituals involving fig tree branches, the euphemistic covering of nude figures with fig trees in marble sculpture, the biblical fig tree, cursed to be barren in the land of usurers, the mildly obscene manus obscena, or fig sign; Dutch Golden Age still-life paintings, with decaying figs symbolising the ephemerality of excess and ornament, Sylvia Plath’s tormenting fig tree which spoils with panicked indecision. We watch excavators and bulldozers plough through the peach fields. Simón takes the Solé-Pinyol fig tree to its inevitable conclusion. 

The ending is sudden. At first when it ended, I thought I had missed something. How could two hours capitulate so suddenly? And what do we make of such an ending? A warning of the threats green corporatism poses for regional producers? A depiction of how industry monopolisation not only suffocates small farmers, but asphyxiates? Where large producers have driven prices — and profit margins — so low that the young Pinyols and other independent farmers have no choice but to leave agriculture entirely? 

It is a prospect not unlike our own in Australia. Deregulation in the early 2000s has produced an effective Coles-Woolworths retail oligopoly today in produce sectors such as dairy, gouging independent farmers out of competitive pricing. This is compounded by the increasing, debilitating exigencies of drought, bushfire and flood losses as electricity costs climb exponentially at the whims of war and the pandemic.

Post-federal election — and in an increasingly inflationary and monopolistic economic landscape — this tale of Mediterranean charm and provincial ennui hits a little too close to home. Whether a cautionary tale of laissez-faire supply chains, or a spotlight on potential victims of the transition to green energies, Alcarràs is likewise a film undecided between tradition and progression. As the young Iris recites back to her grandfather in a particularly moving, and bleak, scene:

If the sun were a daily worker

it wouldn’t rise so early.

If the Marquis had to harvest

we would have died of hunger.

I don’t sing for my voice

or the dawn or the new day,

I sing for my friend

who lost his life for me.

The past slips away in what is ultimately a pyrrhic victory. The song is a wartime heirloom, passed from generations down. The meaning seems lost on Iris.