Courtesy of Participant Media
Aquarela must be seen on a big screen, where the cracks it shows in the ice open up like canyons, and the vastness of the ocean is enveloping. Aquarela also demands concentration. It’s not casual, popcorn entertainment, but an immersion into the immensity of water, the physical source and sustainer of life in our world.
The documentary by Victor Kossakovsky doesn’t narrate a story as much as incant an audio-visual poem whose rhymes are the many sounds of water. Like a good poet, Kossakovsky shows rather than tells. In early scenes, a small band of uniformed men emerge from a white backdrop of winter and poke around on an ice field. Gradually, their language and uniforms become identifiable as Russian. They are police, looking for a car that fell through the ice to the shallow bottom of a lake.
As scene follows scene, the ice becomes sloppier, and car after car crashes through the thinning surface; audible is the creak of the straining pullies as the police laboriously haul the vehicles onto a surface that barely holds. “Usually it melts three weeks later than this,” one soaking-wet driver, rescued, tries to explain.
Like running water, Aquarela has no fixed point and slips without explanation from place to place. In the next sequence, perhaps in Greenland, great mountainous cliffs, dwarfing a passing boat, melt into the ocean as the glaciers crack with a shot like a cannon. The churning, heaving spectacle of ice sheets breaking into crumbs—like the remark of the Russian driver and such apparently random images as a burning building near shore and an alarm siren being sounded—suggest that catastrophe is one of Aquarela’s themes. As the climate warms, the ice melts, the oceans rise and flow through city streets, as in the Miami sequence shot during Hurricane Irma.
Warming or not, in Aquarela, water is a thing of primal majesty. One sequence is filmed aboard a sailboat rising and falling amid roiling winds and shifting mountains of ocean. In another, Venezuela’s Angel Falls simply is a wonder of nature to behold, a glimpse into the sublime.
Aquarela isn’t a Disney nature show; its vision of nature isn’t cute but powerful, always potentially dangerous, deserving of deep respect, threatening yet threatened.
