Pilgrims, Laurynas Bareiša’s previous feature, was an accomplished debut that explored a man’s inability to move past the senseless killing of his brother. It showed promise, but became a bit exhausting since it seemed that the director had one single idea — rage as a substitute for mourning — and was satisfied to present various representations of that idea, with the same characters, over and over. It didn’t seem to move. With Drowning Dry, Bareiša has definitely crafted a plot that goes places. But the film suggests a formal discrepancy between the script and its realization. Structured very much like a Raymond Carver story, Drowning Dry probably looks intricately literary on the page. But the film has trouble communicating the purpose of that approach.
This is the story of two Lithuanian sisters, Juste (Agnė Kaktaitė) and Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė). Juste is married to Tomas (Giedrius Kiela), who appears to be in finance, and Ernesta is married to Lukas (Paulius Markevičius), who is an MMA fighter. The two couples have one child apiece: Juste and Tomas have a daughter named Urte (Olivija Eva Viluné), and Ernesta and Lukas have a son named Kristafus (Herkus Sarapas). At the start of the film, we see Lukas in the ring, winning a fight. The victory does nothing to appease Ernesta, who is terrified that he’ll be hurt or killed. After the fight, Ernesta’s family goes to stay at Juste’s lakeside cabin. An accident occurs (see title), and this changes the course of all their lives.
After nearly 45 minutes of straight narrative, Bareiša suddenly provides a flash-forward, and over the course of the remainder of Drowning Dry we move back and forth in time. The purpose of such a maneuver, particularly in a story about a tragedy, would seem to be an attempt to juxtapose disparate moments that have a direct emotional impact on one another, something that a linear plot presentation wouldn’t accomplish in the same way. But it doesn’t seem that Bareiša achieves this.
Part of the problem is that the viewer knows that something is going to happen. The skipping around in time has the effect of keeping certain key events away from the viewer, like a too-clever game of cat and mouse. Rather than deepening our connection to the family’s circumstances, it comes close to cheapening them, treating them like a salacious mystery. Bareiša’s unadorned realism helps to mitigate this. But his one bit of visual flair, slow zooms in or out of extended master shots, threatens to tilt the balance. Bareiša seems like a director who will eventually make a very good film, but thus far he hasn’t managed to get out of his own way.
Published as part of Locarno Film Festival 2024 — Dispatch 2.
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