As an actor, Gael Garcia Bernal made his name in a string of ambitious films: Alejandro G. Inarritu’s “Amores Perros” and “Babel,” Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y tu Mama Tambien,” Pedro Almodovar’s “Bad Education” and Walter Salles’ “The Motorcycle Diaries” among them. So it’s no surprise that in his limited work as a director, Garcia Bernal has taken a couple of big swings, including this freewheeling black comedy that premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday.
Actually, it feels wrong to call “Hombre al Agua” a black comedy – or, for that matter, to give it any one specific label. It’s a fantasia of sorts that whips up melodrama, satire and social commentary and is full of deception, masks, lies and personal reinventions. There are two different movies within the movie plus a Mexican TV melodrama, and the key line might well be one that Garcia Bernal’s character delivers late in the film: “You are what you make others believe before they catch on.”
Labyrinthine in ways that are both fascinating and frustrating, the film is full of tonal shifts that can sometimes be clunky in ways that are forgivable because they’re deliberate. Garcia Bernal’s last directorial effort, 2019’s “Chicuarotes,” was a genre mashup that didn’t really work; “Hombre al Agua” is a genre mashup that’s a kick.
It begins with lovely vistas as the camera glides through a lavish villa and pans across the beach outside, then settles in a darkened room as Camilo (Garcia Bernal) and his wife Juana (Esmeralda Pimentel) try to have sex, until Juana gets fed up with Camilo’s lack of enthusiasm for her idea to role-play as strangers. A baby in the next room start crying, Camilo and Juana argue about who should get up (doing so with more passion than they’d showed during the sex) and Camilo ends up preparing a bottle, switching on a black-and-white melodrama and falling asleep on the couch with his baby daughter sitting on his chest.
All of this is shot in deep, lustrous shadow – but after the TV drama takes over the screen for a couple of minutes, the cinematic palette shifts from dramatic darkness to a bright, light glare. Plus we get a narrator who fills us in on the backstory. Camilo was a very attentive Cuban lifeguard; he saved Abel (Jorge Salinas) a millionaire who was having cramps while swimming; Abel gave Camilo a job in his seal-manufacturing plant and also introduced him to his daughter, Juana. And we already know what happened there.
Naturally, things get complicated. Abel is hit by a car, and asks Camilo to look after his pregnant mistress, Silvina (Natalia Oreiro), which pleases neither Silvina nor Juana nor the creepy guy who hangs around outside their estate and claims to be Silvina’s husband but really isn’t.
Meanwhile, there’s a director hanging around the house who wants to make a movie about Juana, her career as a pole vaulter, her status as an heiress and “the prejudices people have against the rich.” Juana starts writing the screenplay but won’t show it to Camilo, and eventually Ricky Martin shows up to play the role based on Camilo, though Juana seems pretty desperate to keep the two men apart.
Then, because there’s not enough going on, Abel decides to sell the company to the Dutch (who would like him to lay off a third of the workers first) and run for governor of Yucatan. He enlists Camilo as his chief of staff and holds their first meeting while he’s sitting on the toilet, a tactic apparently borrowed from U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, who famously used it to keep people off-balance.
So you’ve got class struggles, the cares of the idle rich, show business, politics and who knows what else, all swirled into a grand party where everybody is playing a role, adopting a persona or trying to figure out who they can trust. (Short answer, especially for Camilo: nobody.) The movie’s reality is surrounded by fictional representations of that reality: the movie about Juana, a fake documentary cooked up to distract the factory workers from impending layoffs, the TV melodrama that pops up regularly.
“Hombre al Agua” starts out playful and grows more overtly comic, particularly once politics is thrown into the mix. At one point, a character compares the film’s milieu, the world of the rich, to old sci-fi movies where astronauts land on a planet that looks a lot like earth but turns out to be completely different.
It’s Garcia Bernal’s most assured film, which is not to say that the shenanigans are seamless or that the satire always lands. But it doesn’t need to be that sharp or pointed; it’s enough that he has taken the craziness and danger of modern life and whipped up some messy good fun.
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