If, with Call Me By Your Name, Luca Guadagnino set a 21st century standard for leisurely, sun-dappled, queer coming-of-age films, then, nearly a decade later, Jaume Claret Muxart has proposed a new one. His debut feature, Strange River, is another story of a summer holiday, though where Guadagnino’s aesthetic sensibilities were clamped down by respectability, Muxart’s are blown out, oversaturated with glowing greens, vibrating oranges, and blinding blacks, as if the velvety 16mm on which it was filmed was left out in the sun to bake. The sensational colors complement a seemingly naturalistic story of a nuclear family’s summer holiday down the Danube river that, in Muxart’s imagination, quietly enters the realm of fantasy.
The mother, Mónika, a working actress, once made the same trek down the Danube 25 years ago. She was swept up by her first love on that trip, as she explains to her eldest son, Dídac, who is still smarting from a recent rejection by his crush, Gerard. As in Call Me By Your Name, Dídac’s parents are of that quality rarely found in the coming-of-age film: understanding. They know of Dídac’s queer inclinations — his father, Albert, even sweetly inquires about his status with Gerard — though are no less immune to that sting of teenage defensiveness when Dídac reaches his capacity to divulge his feelings.
Dídac’s fickle nature is emblematic of the whole family’s dynamic, which, over the course of their trip, swings wildly between cohesion and disruptive conflict. As often as he tenderly holds hands with his mother, strolling through a sleepy campsite, Dídac wrestles his younger brother, Biel, each of them beholden to inexplicable adolescent rage. Muxart captures this instability with a sensitive eye, alighting on bodies in motion as often as he does on those in repose.
During the family’s periodic rest stops, Dídac encounters a teenage boy who materializes, out of nowhere and in the nude, under the river’s murky water. Faceless at first, he entices and eludes Dídac like a siren, gliding in and out of his view before disappearing into the depths. Later, while resting on the river bank, he’s taken hold by a disembodied hand and pulled into the river, where he comes face to face with the boy for the first time. The occasion doesn’t inspire fear, though, later, when night falls, the empty buildings and unlit recesses of the camp grounds seamlessly transform into a cruising site for vacationing young men. Suddenly, budding sexuality mutates into furtive glances and hushed whispers from the shadows, forming a potent churn of paranoia and carnality in their wake. In teasing the imaginative capacities of a yearning heart, Muxart articulates the dimensions of Didac’s sexuality as not only fluid, but unburdened by logic.
The family makes further stops at the School of Design in Ulm, where Albert expounds on the architecture that fuses rationality with emotion, and his memories as a young student carrying a three-legged stool. Later, in a nearby modernist neighborhood, Mónika meets a fellow actress with whom she connects over a shared role in Hölderlin’s play The Death of Empedocles, and fawns over like a lovestruck teenager. The brief interlude marks a notable departure from Didac’s perspective, affording Mónika a sense of inner life that acts as more than just a counterbalance to her son’s, but almost an intimation. Their multilingual exchange, too, resembles the family’s borderless vacation, marked by the intuitive bends of their literary passions rather than by social propriety. The result is a palpable erotic charge that informs the final act’s ambiguous, fantastical trajectory.
Muxart pulls at the seam between imagination and reality as hard as he can. When the mysterious boy from the river materializes at the university, he calls silently to Dídac, who follows him around the campus like a cat would a mouse. While Albert and Mónika play a duet of the third movement of Clementi’s Sonata in G Major, Opus 36, the boys meet in the empty cafeteria, the distant piano reverberating through the building, gaining speed until it becomes the score to an erotically charged exchange of glances and mirrored choreography. The scene recalls the thrill of the waltz in Minnelli’s Madame Bovary, where the sexual possibilities of being seen in a new way floods the ingénue like music fills a room.
Suggestion is one of Muxart’s most powerful tools, and in the ambiguity of the boy he finds its most moving application. Even as he and Dídac escape the already idyllic setting of the family holiday for something more remote, Muxart never precludes the possibility that the once water-bound siren is still a figment of Dídac’s imagination. Thus, it’s possible the only thing Biel sees when Dídac races with with him through the neighborhood’s back alleys and down to the riverbank — a small boat waiting to whisk them off to who-knows-where like the lovers in Bergman’s My Summer With Monika — is a teenage boy who is entirely too understood, hoping to keep a fantasy just for himself.
Published as part of New Directors/New Films 2026 — Dispatch 1.
Comments are closed.