Nuria Ibánez Castañeda’s Una corriente salvaje (A Wild Stream, 2018) opens on Omar, wading waist-deep off a remote beach in Baja California, suffocating an octopus. Later that evening he tells his friend Chilo that this was nothing compared to a 7kg specimen he once wrestled to the surface. As he cannot swim, Chilo is unable to pitch in with a similar story of his own, and so he shifts the conversation towards their hands. He notes that Omar’s are much whiter and manlier than his own rosy palms, which makes Omar proud, but also apprehensive as to the ambiguity behind Chilo’s comment. These emotions, among others, arise in endless combinations throughout Ibánez Castañeda’s intimate portrait of the men’s companionship on the Mexican beach each has come to dwell upon in solitude.
Through a series of late night conversations, captured beautifully by candlelight, Omar expresses the freedom he longed for when working a laborious dead-end job in the city. Chilo has come to find peace after a traumatic break in his family. At first timidly, the two share their thoughts on work, family, isolation, and freedom and analyse tropes of masculine identity each felt shaped by in their home culture. Castañeda’s documentary, which competed last month in Cinéma du Réel’s international selection, patiently observes Omar and Chilo’s growing friendship and slow day-to-day activities along the seafront.
Throughout this process, Castañeda’s presence as a woman director inflects how we observe the men (despite her having worked with Spanish cinematographer Diego Romero Suárez-Llanos). This effect was enhanced at Cinéma du Réel by its curated pairing with Elena López Riera’s Los que desean (Those Who Desire, 2018) from the international short film competition. Structured around a woman’s off-screen reading of the competition rules, Los que desean documents a vivid pigeon courtship competition organised by the men of her hometown in rural Spain. As we watch the men watch the pigeons flock after a single female pigeonne, the short film generates a sub-textual commentary on male desire that is as humorous as it is distressing and surreal. For 24 mins we are placed in the midst of colourfully hand-painted pigeons, raised in abstinence, whose ranks in the ‘courtship’ competition are recounted back to their male trainers over public radio.
The non-male gaze in Una corriente salvaje similarly accentuates the instances where machismo blurs into subtle homoeroticism that occur in Omar and Chilo’s growing emotional intimacy. In the many moments when the male body is on display, the filmmaker chooses to empathise with her subjects, observing their vulnerability and sensitivity with care. In a particularly delicate scene, Omar and Chilo strip down to their underpants to swim at night. This is both a swim lesson for Chilo and a test of intimacy as they expose their bodies to one another, full of humorous deflection and moments that play with each man’s (dis)comfort with proximity. The men render themselves vulnerable to Castañeda and her crew, who in turn provide them with a space to be observed without being reduced to their insecurities. This moment is captured with nuance and tenderness as the men joke and drift under the dark sky.
Rather than flip the infamous “he looks, she is looked at” dynamic pin-pointed by Laura Mulvey in 1975, Una corriente salvaje emphasises the subjectivity of its protagonists. In this way, Una corriente salvaje surpasses the consumption-driven binary that drives, for instance, the myriad of gazes at play during the pigeon competition seen in Los que desean. This endures as Chilo and Omar spend their days on the shore discussing how they feel perceived by others, how they present themselves as men in order to be respected, and how each previously viewed the other from across the beach. They are at all times witnessed from a respectful distance, and never subjected to any external pressure to clarify the intentions behind their amorphous friendship.
Nuria Ibánez Castañeda, who was born in Spain and works in Mexico, was given TrueFalse’s True Vision Award this year for her advancement of the art of nonfiction cinema. For her latest film, she spent a month living on the beach with Chilo and Omar before beginning to film them. The time spent shooting, she explains, respected a set of constraints meant to reinforce the film’s focus on the men’s interdependence and self-imposed isolation: no filming beyond the beach, no filming tourists passing by, no filming any women the men go to see, etc. Wishing to create a sense that Omar and Chilo are the only two left alive without falling into voyeurism, she focused on the sensuality of their activities (fishing, collecting resources, burning away their trash) and its echo in their private introspection.
Against the horizon of endless water, the presence of their bodies is enhanced, as is their void when absent. Their biological existence among the natural landscape feels peaceful and uncomplicated. Besides a few preys the men catch in the shallow waters, Chilo and Omar are the only beings in the film. As Chilo notes: “Here there is nothing to look at. Stones and more stones, water and more water”. The vast expanse of ocean filling most shots comes to act as a metaphor for both the sense of freedom and sense of entrapment experienced by their isolated existence.
Having removed all opportunity to observe and perhaps decode the men through their interactions with others, the film constrains its frame of societal reference to the solitary companions and their natural surroundings. Observed outside their societal context and personal histories, the men’s words and actions come to hold greatest weight in painting a picture of their current place in the world. This enhances the documentary’s exploration of how unassuming human intimacy can surpass established modes of social engagement that too often curtail intimacy’s infinite forms.
While the conscious subtraction of all other human presence can also be read as inauthentic, it succeeds in heightening attentiveness to the men’s introspection. Castañeda’s directorial choice also raises the important question of whether it would be less inauthentic to have sacrificed the peripheral natural world in favour of including the peripheral human world. Ultimately, Castañeda’s direction reflects the men’s decision to live alone and, through this, offers them a generous space in which to reveal their intimate, fragile and imperfect selves.
