Sea Change
By Eileen G’Sell
Forastera
Dir. Lucia Aleñar Iglesias, Spain/Italy/Sweden, Grasshopper Film
There’s an uncanniness to the experience of grieving in a beautiful place—like the iridescence that trails from the tide, gone the second you look at it. It’s as though the heart can’t process the lost thing in the midst of too much sunlight. Forastera, Spanish filmmaker Lucia Aleñar Iglesias’s refulgent directorial debut, explores this process from the vantage of Cata (Zoe Stein), a pensive teen from Madrid spending the summer in Mallorca with her grandparents. Bicycling in a bikini with her sister Eva (Martina Garcia), canoodling with a Swedish dude in a rocky cove, Cata breezes through the activities common to summer vacation movies. But rather than experience some sexual awakening, heartbreak, or lesson on the limits of libertinism, Cata comes to realize just how little she knows her own family—and, more so, her distinct place within it.
An atmospheric film in which the dramatic Balearic backdrop abuts a white sand beach, Forastera privileges crystalline shot composition and soundscape over expository dialogue. Over a dark blank screen, the placid crash of waves segues into a close-up of the heroine peacefully sun-bathing, the shadow-puppet of her sister’s hand playfully grazing the brim of her nose.
Catalina (Marta Angelat), Cata’s beloved padrina, reluctantly tolerates her husband’s chauvinism. Whether beckoning his wife to refresh his friends’ drinks on the new terraza he constructed or massaging his wife’s shoulders as he gloats of the garden he will build next, Tomeu (LluĂs Homar) is generally a benevolent tyrant. In turn, Catalina is hardly passive; she badgers Tomeu to teach Cata to drive, despite their mutual lack of interest, and smokes a leisurely cigarette after insisting on filing Eva’s nails.
Whether impersonating her namesake on the phone or fitting perfectly into her vintage clothes, Cata bears a tender likeness to her grandmother central to the film’s pathos. If anything, more time between the pair onscreen would have fueled the slow burn to follow. Instead, about 15 minutes in, Cata returns home to discover Catalina lifeless on the staircase outside the house, a trash bag in her moonlit hand. The rest of the film explores the gulf left between members of the family after her death—and the guilt endured by Tomeu, who heard nothing of his wife’s fall. “Was she still alive when you found her?” he begs Cata through tears. “No, she wasn’t,” she stoically replies.
Most of what we learn about the fallen matriarch is based on old photographs or recollections shared among friends and family. But lines like “Remember when she hid in the pantry to eat cookies?” between two sisters don’t reveal much aside from a secret sweet tooth, hardly revelatory. Learning more about Catalina would leave viewers all the more haunted by her absence. Her spirit lingers on in the flickering fluorescent kitchen light—the “ghost” joked about in an early scene—and in the sudden beauty mark Cata spots on her cheek after trying on her grandmother’s ’70s wrap dress. But, amidst the film’s other characters, Catalina the person feels a bit overlooked.
Self-conscious about her inability to express her sorrow, Cata doesn’t shed a tear the weeks after her grandmother dies, and her healing seems predicated on mediating between her squabbling mother and grandfather. If Cata is quietly perceptive of Tomeu’s grief, her mother Pepa (Núria Prims) is reactive and confrontational, finding her father's obstinate nature harder to swallow in Catalina's absence. Cata is more adept at handling Tomeu, revealing how capably a young woman can admire a flawed paternal figure while still recognizing his flaws. “Am I ridiculous?” he asks while she poses him for a series of photographs with an old manual film camera. “No, very handsome,” she assures. Sitting in her grandmother’s empty chair on the terrace, smoking her cigarettes, she serves as a living, breathing reminder of Catalina’s legacy; she also becomes a temporary companion for Tomeu, to whom she refuses to condescend.
The film’s tranquil pace and preponderance of teenagers languidly hanging out nicely evokes its Mallorcan setting, a place marked by siestas and village festivals. Yet Cata feels very contemporary, an outsider to Tomeu’s rule, and unafraid to challenge the implicitly sexist order of her family home. She stands up to her grandfather when he barks at her to “brake!” during a driving lesson. When he privately disparages her own mother as “disrespectful” in his house, she replies, “I don’t know what your issue is, but she doesn’t deserve that treatment.” In witnessing Tomeu’s hostility toward her mother, and experiencing similar harshness herself, Cata is able to empathize as she never could before. For her, growing up is less about superficial milestones than seeing how she is shaped by the forces that preceded her.
Forastera—the feminine word for “stranger” or “foreigner” in Spanish—is most invested in how families must reorient themselves when an elder suddenly passes on; authority isn’t necessarily handed off to the other elders, and intergenerational bonds can both strengthen and falter. The film further reflects on the liminal borders of selfhood—though stunned by her own sadness, Cata fills her grandmother’s shoes with confidence and grace. More subtly, the film confronts the ways in which gender roles can be flipped after a serious loss, and a grounded young woman can help her family see the light.