“Talk to me in a Continental accent.” That’s what Juana (Esmeralda Pimentel), a Mexican corporate heiress, begs of her Cuban immigrant husband Camilo (Gael García Bernal) in a rushed attempt to seduce him. His accent sticks to his lips like honey on a finger — and Juana has had her fill of honey. Their quickie is interrupted by the crying of their baby, shielded only from the marital bed activities by a toldillo and the space between the floor and raised mattress. This sexually frustrated opening scene is the last time in Hombre al agua that the couple attempts to connect intimately. From the Latin American regionalism and estranging place for Cubans within (wealthy) Mexican society and the alienation of Camilo within his own home, to the deromanticization of the film’s married couple at its center, this opening is faithfully indicative of what is to come.
Camilo met Juana by the design of her father, Abel (Jorge Salinas). Abel, an offensively wealthy Mexican businessman with a bad reputation, fakes his own drowning on a Cuban beach so that a lifeguard, by happenstance, Camilo, can “save” him and then be rewarded with the millionaire’s gratitude in ways that save the latter’s poor reputation. Ripped from medieval times, Camilo is given both a bride and a job running one of his factories in Yucatán. Now he lives in a stone Romanesque country estate as Juana has a mid-life crisis and elicits an entitled Brazilian actress, Fabiana (Débora Nascimento), to make a film about her life, though it isn’t that interesting in the first place, with her situated within the confines of her own home.
As Camilo, García Bernal cannibalizes every actor he performs alongside, to the degree that it becomes distracting how multi-dimensional his performance is while everyone around him gets stuck with one-note telenovela roles (the fault of Bernal, in his capacity as both writer and director). Some of this is by design; the film takes place largely in their estate, like the setting of many telenovelas, and a diegetic show he watches called Liberdade calls attention to the mirroring of structures. It is like the telenovela… Do you get it yet? But, as with a powerful emotional scene alongside Fabiana near the film’s end, even when the script allows room for others to match his emotional depth and physicality of presence, Bernal steals the camera’s gaze from his fellow cast. Imbalanced though it may feel in context, it is a truly exceptional performance, and the actor’s straight-laced comedic timing has never been better. “Have you seen Vampires in Havana?” he asks. “It’s about vampires in Havana,” with a rhythmic nonchalance that turns the simple line read into momentous laughter. His accent is convincing enough to both sell the Cubanness of the character and, simultaneously, the Mexican life he now lives — and that’s a difficult rope to walk with elegance.
Indeed, the importance of nationality and regionalism is a fixture and not a bug. Whenever Camilo does something or says something just a tiny bit differently than a native Mexican would, the response is always along the lines of, “Ooooh, you are truly Cuban, aren’t you?” Women, including his wife, exoticize differences — from both themselves and their lovers. According to them, Colombians are more attractive than Cubans in this ethnic hierarchy, and his Cubanness comes with baggage as heavy as the PCC, too. He doesn’t seem to really identify as a socialist, nor embody the cause of communism, but the two chase him from his proletarian life as a lifeguard in the Caribbean into his arranged and wealthy life in Yucatán. The Brazilian actress adds another layer of exotification to the house, while also perhaps encouraging a possible metaphorical interpretation of Latin American politics whereby Cuba has been caught up in a game it never asked for as the, historically, more United States-aligned Mexico and politically hazardous Brazil reap rewards from the Western exploitation of Cuba. The Argentinian woman staying in the house (Natalia Oreiro) further adds a fourth country into the mix, making the symbolic tokenism of nationalities all that much more primed for exegesis.
Hombre al agua is a well-directed film. Bernal’s third run behind the camera shows he has clearly learned something from the likes of the world-class directors he has worked with, including Alfonso Cuarón, M. Night Shyamalan, and Walter Salles. The production design is immaculate, and the camera finds stories to tell with its images that the performances stutter to communicate on their own. In one medium close-up, Camilo’s pristine and clear face in the center of the frame gets flanked from both sides by the blurry heads of Juana and Fabiana. They are close enough for desire to palpate through their mere proximity alone, and their obfuscation leaves that lip-locked trajectory as a possibility. Surely, they will kiss, right? Through a directorial choice as simple as who is in focus and who is out of focus, the strange tension between the two comes across almost as vigorously as Camilo’s own alienation. Kiss: they do not.
Still, Hombre al agua bites off more than it can chew. The entire character of Silvina (Oreiro), an unwed woman impregnated by Abel and entrusted (or pawned off) to Camilo, is extraneous and goes nowhere important. Despite her pitiful situation and relative abundance of screen time, we are given so little to go off that empathizing with her is an uphill battle. Camilo gets startled by a man who claims to be her husband and then a stalker, and runs into him several times, though his entire presence manifests only as redundant exposition. Meanwhile, the sapphic tension between Juana and Fabiana never capsizes into an affair or hookup in the way the telenovela intensity would lead one to expect. And then there’s Camilo’s childhood dream of being an animator, which is narratively important but thematically inert; it comes up almost like an intrusive thought, seemingly on so that it can return later in a climactic scene. Most frustratingly of all, a dog Camilo rescues chews up Juana’s screenplay, which she had been slavishly devoted to for half the film, and her reaction to the damage goes hidden — if she had one at all. Maybe those missing pages were from Hombre al agua. As effective as the film is in many ways, that would explain more than a few things elsewhere.
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