Alcarràs

ALCARRÀS   **1/2

Carla Simón

2022

IDEA:  In the town of Alcarràs, Spain, a family faces the looming destruction of the peach farm they've tilled for generations when the owners decide to take back the land for development.

BLURB:  With its cast of nonprofessional actors, unfussy camerawork, and focus on the lives and labor of ordinary working-class people, Alcarràs operates wholly in the mode of neorealism, to mixed results. Simón has clearly put a lot of thought and care into developing the interplay of her large ensemble cast, whose members convincingly represent three generations within an extended family. Their sprawling dynamic is permitted ample space to play out in scenes that showcase their bustling, often idle interactions, with Simón staging multiple simultaneous levels of conversation and action that teem beyond the frame. The sense created of a family ecosystem - with all its frictions and alliances - is the film’s chief accomplishment. Alcarràs is less successful in dramatizing the impact of its central conflict on the family. Simón’s non-hierarchical, multi-character scope may be good for a kind of observational macro social portraiture, but it proves too diffuse to sow narrative immediacy, and results in individual characters that don’t have much definition. The film’s visual style is similarly lacking in distinctiveness and punch. One wishes the always-timely subjects of Alcarràs - collective labor, the loss of tradition to corporate industry - had a more impassioned and inventive vehicle for their exploration.