If, as the film’s logline suggests, we are to read the humble oyster as a “queer icon of New York City’s unlikely survival story,” then the structural core of Emily Packer’s Holding Back the Tide must be located in Sue Wicks, an oyster farmer whom the film frequently doubles back to talk with. Wading through shallow water in bib overalls, Sue’s conversation with the camera neatly lays out the film’s assertion of the oyster’s symbolic weight, noting that they “start out as female and then change to male, depending on the balance of male, female in the water. It’s always the harmony and balance of what needs to be done.” With Holding Back the Tide, the non-binary director and the film’s largely queer cast and crew deliver a project that refrains from making overtly explicit any essayistic throughline, and instead allows the oyster’s history — as also detailed here by activists and architects, former chefs and present gourmands — to open up a conversation between past and present, present and future, that implicitly speaks to our ever-changing cultural landscape and holds up a narrative both historical and environmental that speaks to lived queer experiences. In this sense, Holding Back the Tide is a decidedly ambient film, its images floating through, past, and alongside ideas of ecological conservation, identity, and the historical morphology of New York City and its inhabitants.
This fuzzy mode of building out structure and theme makes for Holding Back the Tide’s greatest strength. Freely flowing between ideas, voices, and urban geographies, Packer’s film is abstracted through the lens of poetry, following personal narratives and collective spaces to their instances of intersection, resisting a lesser film’s instinct to mistake explicit thesis for cohesion. This mode of dovetailing is likewise reflective of Packer’s approach to fiction and nonfiction within the film, flooding its interstices with expressionistic images of hands entwined underwater or quick blips of performed narration, sometimes affecting the posture of direct cinema in its observational gaze, at others embracing a performativity to reinforce thematic linkages. Circling back to Wicks, then, it becomes clear that the scenes spent with her also function as the film’s visual grounding — both balance and locus. While Packer’s style tilts mostly toward impressionistic collage elsewhere, punctuated by the aforementioned fictional flashes of recreation, the bivalve farmer’s sequences remain unadorned, foregrounding her subject against gray skies and calm blue waters, the two bleeding together at the horizon, the frame’s gradient of color textured only by oyster baskets dotting the landscape.
The flip side of the film’s fluidity of discourse and style is that at times there can be a palpable tension between its moments of intentional artifice and those that feel more concretely cinéma vérité. Sometimes this tension can feel productive, tethering disparate images and ideas to the film’s lyrical core, but at others it’s interruptive and smacks of affectation, distracting viewers from more humble moments of power. Packer’s approach to the material is undeniably refreshing in a streaming world that has built a cottage industry of flattened, purely expositional documentary filmmaking — imagining a straightforward micro-history doc on oysters sounds like cinematic Valium — but it can also result in a creeping sense here that the film’s baroque seams are masking a laissez faire approach to construction rather than a carefully curatorial one, especially with regard to choices of scene duration and sequencing. Still, only a fool would prefer a lecture, and if Holding Back the Tide’s greatest sin is that it leverages its aesthetic framework toward overly ornamental ends, its experimental and experiential virtues are still far too rare in documentary cinema’s increasingly literal world to turn one’s nose up at, as is Packer’s willingness to build a wonderfully visual work of art around its central metaphor.
DIRECTOR: Emily Packer; CAST: ddd; DISTRIBUTOR: Grasshopper Film; IN THEATERS: September 6; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 17 min.
