Melancholy nearby Not so long ago, Paz Fabrega, who began her directorial career, in her debut, manages to demonstrate not only a love for minimalist aesthetics, but also her own reading of classical human themes that come to life not in cool Europe, but in the midst of the bright pristineness of Latin America.
Deprived of a strict plot that gave way to a long saturated frame, Cold Waters of the Sea is a melancholy of feelings that exists somewhere near each of us, making the heart beat stronger and leading the consciousness into an unknown reality. Signs of this melancholy are found in all the scenes drawn in two independent plot lines. Even the warm Pacific coast of Costa Rica is unable to warm those whose souls are frozen thin ice of alienation, replacing the usual existence. Little Karina, who lives in a large family enclave below the poverty line, feels this on an intuitive level of the present, while an adult Marianne, spending New Year holidays with her boyfriend, embodies traumatic aspects of the past in her crisis. Their chance meeting and quick separation become something special for each, but in both cases it is more suffering than happy illumination.
Paz Fabrega, in the work of which you want to see a new original style, offers viewers to become full participants in a mysterious process, for which he throws them various semantic images, whether they are snakes thrown by the sea on the shore, deep pits and tunnels in the sand, excavated by local children and more resembling open traps for strangers. In general, the visual series of the picture is one of its indisputable advantages, and on each individual stage you can build a long associative series.
Separate footage of “Cold Waters of the Sea” really seems too hopeless, especially if you imagine the distant prospect of the future of the heroes, which is already full of alarming doubts. The world of Fabreg reveals both structural disorders and social disharmony in people, because in the film, far from socialism, they still find a place for reasoning about the current economic state of society. However, the characters do not cause persistent alienation and, on the contrary, are very curious in their kind. This is especially true for young children, who are often placed in notoriously difficult stage conditions, such as the idea of showing them buried to the throat in the sand. I've never seen that before.
Later it becomes clear that behind the surreal frame of Fabreg’s cinema lies too much truth about people and their lives, in which, one way or another, there is always something universal that unites everyone at least for a moment. Melancholy corroded adults or children, simply frightened by too complex for them theme of existence in the world, find themselves on one side of the protective barricades, fleeing either chaotic flight in a circle or immersion in themselves. And all around the same inexhaustible silence, reminding that the struggle with yourself is only emptiness.