Not every film has an
implicit Thoreau signature reflective of the nineteenth-century Romantic turn
from the age of Reason. Not every film brings to mind the Romantic painter,
Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851), whose painting of nature’s green growing over
classic Roman pillars as if to say, nature has the last word. The
European film, Strange River (2025), is such a film.
The key to making these connections lies not in the film’s dialogue, but,
rather, in Jaume Muxart’s consistent choice to direct the film by ending
several scenes with elongated camera-shots of nature. This leitmotif has
Thoreau’s Walden Pond written all over it and is an implicit
critique of rationality and the related artificial societies that mankind has
constructed at the expense of being natural.
The film centers on Didac, a sixteen year-old boy who,
as a typical teenager, is engulfed in the growing pains of self-discovery. This
takes place on a family biking and camping trip along the Danube river. The
film opens while the parents and three boys are biking near the mouth of the
river, and ends with the family angst gone where the river is much larger; life
has been more fully experienced, with the parents having reunited from being emotionally
fraught, and Didac having had a brief fling (not including gay sex) on a small
boat overnight with another boy. Boys will be boys; nothing definite should be
extrapolated. Early on, Lena, the mother, tells Didac, “This might be the last
summer that the family is together.” Two arguments between the parents bear out
the mother’s prognosis that the couple might get a divorce, and her sexual
fling with a young man one night during the trip bears out her desire to wander.
Meanwhile, Didac is initially aggrieved that Gerard, a
boy from school on whom Didac has a crush, has been ignoring him. Didac speaks
with his father, Albert, on “the frustration of not being desired.” Albert
urges his teenage son to share how he feels with Gerard. Both parents support
Didac’s romantic interest in Gerard. “You guys kissed,” both parents separately
remind their son with winks. For something much deeper than an
infatuation, frustration is an understatement, so Didac’s
crushes on boys are clearly not very serious, and he may eventually be sexually
interested in women. Put somewhat bluntly, the importance of the role that
water plays in how Muxart depicts nature in the film, especially with shots of
Didac in particular swimming naked, brings to mind the problem in
nature wherein heterosexual sexual intercourse is naturally well-lubricated
(if not rushed) whereas anal penetration is not, but Didac’s instinctual urges
for boys sexually are natural too. Also problematically, the two elongated camera
close-ups of Didac’s butt while he is swimming on two occasions almost creep
out the wide shots of a boy swimming naked, which prima facie can be construed
as showing a human being fully in nature, and thus natural (whereas wearing gray
suits in bland offices in artificial skyscrapers is not). If the film can be
characterized as a love story, it is that of a family, rather than
two boys, and, moreover, a love story with nature. To be sure,
Didac takes after his mother in that both engage in “extracurricular” flings
during the trip. In fact, Didac sees Lena kissing a younger man one night at a
camp-grounds. “Don’t look at me that way,” Lena tells her eldest son the next
day; she goes on to tell him that she had had a romantic night with a stranger
on the same route twenty years before the present trip. That foray took place
on a small boat and the young man disappeared, and Didac has the same
experience with a boy on the current trip. With that boy, Alexander,
disappearing in the morning before Didac wakes up, the film lapses in skipping
ahead to Didac being with his family on a large boat without accounting for how
the 16 year-old boy gets from the small boat anchored in the large river back
to his parents. If Didac’s brief, free-spirit, foray with Alexander is supposed
to feel magical, Alexander leaving Didac alone on the boat is too much reality.
In fact, rather than viewing the film as falling within the “gay cinema” genre,
if there is such a type (try “romance films,” as falling in love is falling in
love), I contend that Muxart situates the film as a family dynamic couched
within nature, in and as a part of nature. Rather than being apart
from nature, and thus other animals, our species, homo sapiens, is in the
animal kingdom, and this is evinced both sexually and in how we raise our
offspring.
During the trip, while at
an empty school that Albert attended as a boy, he gives his wife and three
boys, who are less than attentive, a lecture on the building’s architecture.
Albert claims that the rationalistic style is relaxing, but this is undercut as
an argument ensues. Significantly, that scene ends with the camera staying on a
tree whose fine branches and leaves are swaying in the wind. Nature is
relaxing. In fact, Muxart has the 16-mm lens changed as the trip goes on
because the river is larger as the family progresses on the route along the
river, and shots of the water are salient in the film and to its very meaning.
In fact, the film ends with a wide, sustained shot of the wide river, as if to
say that nature has the last word as image. That the family, or at
least Didac, swims nude can be taken as saying that his teenage growing pains
are natural—that he is part of nature. When he is masturbating on the bank of
the river after swimming nude alone, the greenery around him is as natural as
his facial expressions, especially his eyes, as he is stroking his penis. As he
approaches orgasm, a long camera shot of the river water sparkling in the
sunlight with emotive instrumental music makes the connection with nature
clear. What he is doing is entirely natural, and thus good. Even
after Didac and his dad have a father-son talk on Didac having kissed a boy at
school, a homosexual encounter that Didac initially denies as he tells his
father, “You are too old to understand,” a long camera-shot of the river, which
is wider than at the beginning of the film, ensues as if to say, nature has the
last word; Didac should go on his natural instincts rather
than try to rationalize or justify his attraction to other boys. My point is
that Didac’s homosexual urges are not the point of the film; rather, such urges
serve as props for Muxart’s leitmotif that we as a species are a part of
nature, rather than cast apart, as Albert says in the film, “When no one lives
in a building, it dies.” We may design and build buildings, but we are corporeal,
organic beings and thus a part of nature.
We can move figuratively to a larger “camera shot” by changing our lens to the nineteenth century, when Romanticism evinced both by the painter Joseph Turner and the philosopher Henry David Thoreau eclipsed the Age of Reason. To be sure, it had been during the eighteenth century that the Earl of Shaftsbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith wrote on ethics by stressing the sentiment of disapprobation as being ethical judgment that some conduct has been unethical. There is no hint of Kant’s ethical categorical imperative wherein a logical contradiction in universalizing a maxim can be taken as evidence that the maxim is unethical. Instead, the viewer of the film is looking out on the river perhaps as Thoreau looked out on Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Even Aristotle looked to nature, and so too does Muxart in making Strange River; we just need to look at how several important scenes end. Just as Albert and Lena do not move forward with divorce, so too, the family does not divorce itself from nature.
