Aquarela

Water is everywhere always. That’s the briefest description of “Aquarela,” a new film by Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky.

But it starts, and stays for a long time, with ice. Ice on a body of water that is too thin to support the weight of a car. It doesn’t tell you where it is at any given moment, but here it’s with some police figures who drill and hammer through ice and then very gingerly try to hoist a submerged car. As he widens his perspective we understand the presence of a lake, or perhaps a bay, on which lunatics speed their vehicles; in fact he captures, at 94 frames per second, one of those cars going under broken ice; getting closer we see that one passenger has drowned; on the shore, there is a large village building burning.

No narrator will rescue us here. We’re about to spend an hour and twenty minutes change watching and hearing the awesome implacable power of water without any expositional assistance.

For awhile people disappear from the camera’s view: Icebergs fall off of glaciers into water and rise up again with noise rather like an earthquake attending them.

Sometimes the camera just sits between ocean and sky, or hovers above churning roiling water; the abstract patterns it makes are dizzying and terrifying.

They get more terrifying when the sky turns gray. A sailing yacht is seen as a storm starts churning up around it (two crew members turn wheels climb masts make moves while knowing they need to work quickly but without using words). Some will recognize Miami as Hurricane Irma pummels it here one brave filmmaker ventures outside runs up boulevard its traffic lights hanging by wires after having been unmoored from their posts palm trees getting fronds ripped off by brutal winds.

People turn up again in what appears to be an underground cave flooding? Here amazing imagery attains level of terrifying abstractness.

This is a purely sensationalistic cinematic experience that paradoxically encourages reflection and contemplation, although the use of some (admittedly pretty good) heavy metal music on the soundtrack feels like a bit of overreaching; the guitar riffs rhyme with the growth of a tidal wave to such an extent you’re almost waiting for a gravelly bass voice to announce “EXTREEEEEEEEME WEATHERRRRR!!!!” The genuine awesome on display here doesn’t need that cheese injection.

Watch Aquarela For Free On Gomovies.