Strange River Review: Queer Teen Awakening Redrawn With Lush Enigma In One Of The Year’s Best Films

Strange River is a rare gift of a film. This might be the closest cinema has come to approximating the unique headrush of queer teenage discovery. In his feature debut, Catalan writer-director Jaume Claret Muxart goes spare on dialogue and evokes patterns of thought, imaginative vision and tender melancholy. There’s a deep fragility so central to puberty which the director has precisely gauged. It’s that phase when feelings and fancies can shape up to be seismic. Everything feels bottomless, churning. The film maps this intensity against a drifting slipstream of recognition, denial and growth. Pain is inescapable as the callow heart seeks to scamper away and forge its own detour. Strange River builds an emotional, internal space by its own dream logic and lures you in without presupposing cues or needless connective filaments. Here’s a filmmaker inviting you to be one with his work’s peculiar, subliminal impulses even while it constantly evades a firm grasp.

The 16-year-old Didac (Jan Monter) has grudgingly joined his family for a camping trip down the Danube river. He’s fractious with his younger brothers, Biel (Bernat Solé) and Guiu (Roc Colell). Didac is rather annoyed to be on this excursion. But his mother Monika (Nausicaa Bonnín) hints this might be the last occasion the family is somewhere together. Didac doesn’t have to push for an explanation. The reason floats in the air. Didac’s father, an architect Albert (Jordi Oriol), is more bothered with acting as a competent tour guide for the family. Albert talks passionately about the history of certain buildings, the cultural ecosystems some were. Just as he urges his family to close their eyes and imagine themselves in the past when a now-desolate structure once housed the site of so much potential, Muxart too is ushering in a space of pure subjectivity. If you come in expecting neat threads of causality, a perfectly coherent association of scenes, you might be put off. Muxart here is tailing something more elusive and lyrical, nevertheless ensconced in easily relatable emotional beats.

Didac is wrestling with the vortex of his pining for Gerard, a neighbour he kissed but who doesn’t want him. His frustration in not being desired is both felt and understood by his parents. His queerness is familiar to them. There are no overwrought coming-out moments. They reassure him, being as kind as possible to someone struck with unrequited yearning. But his own sexual certainty is still inchoate. He swats away his father’s casual comment on his being gay, insisting that it’s just one person and he ought not to bracket him into that identity. He’s still a young person flailing in chrysalis, curious and seeking and restless. The film explores the very tenuousness he has to navigate before settling into selfhood, adult realisations. Suddenly, the river and night collude to deliver a teenage boy, (Francesco Wenz), appearing like a merman. Scenes where the boy just lurks around the corner, raking Didac’s heightening interest, are spiked with sensuous possibility. The boy mutters no word, vanishing and resurfacing like an uncanny whisper borne on the breeze.

The brothers bicker and try to hide their secret thrusting feelings from each other. Deflections give way to bouts of misplaced aggression. In these thrashing attacks you encounter the wretchedness, the vulnerability of having to confront rejection and hurt.

Muxart trusts these moods, hues and textures to propel his film. Narrative is continually sheared off to emerge as mere mist draping these characters in tension and silence. There’s tremendous soulfulness folded ever so delicately within its cinematic rhythm. Mystery swirls thick and rich. Pablo Paloma’s camerawork is as richly attentive to sunlight gleaming on skin as the landscapes.

This film is a sensory plunge into a very particular atmosphere, what the myriad sights and sounds and tactile connotations are of a place and those moving through it. Muxart is a master at mounting enigmatic, highly charged sequences. A night-time scene finds Didac wending through a gay cruising site. He keeps his distance while struggling to temper the surge of forbidden thrill. Suddenly, he takes a woman making out with a stranger for his mother and runs away as if terribly betrayed. This sting does reflect in few subsequent scenes with his mother, but it fades soon once she confides about her ex-boyfriend with whom she had visited this place 25 years ago. Essentially, she exhorts him to be open about his feelings, seize the moment of confession instead of letting the chance slide by. Strange River flits between projection of varying degrees as the mystery boy and Didac keep crossing paths.

Muxart is extraordinary at mining the empty space between the boys, filling it with throbbing erotic anticipation. The film is a slick orchestration of erotic suspense, slanting it always through a teenager slowly grappling with contours of desire, its intense, piercing losses. The director achieves woozy impressions, leading to a final act poised as a liberating strand of closure. Strange River's feverish imagination leaks into your soul.