J Paul Johnson
Originally titled Sisters, or Sesės in its native Lithuania, Laurynas Bareiša’s sophomore film is now called Drowning Dry in its international release. Its new title—a good deal more precise—works both literally and figuratively in Bareiša’s drama where tragedy looms almost without relent. To “drown dry” is, normally, to avoid drowning in water but then to suffer, subsequently, small amounts of water in the lungs that eventually cause pulmonary edema. A title like that will have viewers ready to panic the second they see characters don swimsuits or approach a body of water. Drowning Dry, though, is more about the secondary consequences of a tragedy than it is the more obvious and apparent ones.
Bareiša’s plot is simple and straightforward as the two sisters of Drowning Dry‘s original title—Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė) and Justė (Agnė Kaktaitė)—plan a small celebration. Ernesta’s husband, Lukas (Paulius Markevičius) has just won a martial-arts tournament, and it is Tomas’s, Justė’s husband’s (Giedrius Kiela), birthday as well. The two couples, each with their own single child, together own a modest vacation home in the country, inherited from the sisters’ family, and retire there for a long weekend of food, drink, and, yes, swimming.
But drowning, dry or otherwise, isn’t the only looming tragedy. Bareiša’s script subtly conveys the dangers of the everyday. If Lukas escapes his competitions without incident, Tomas’ reckless driving might endanger his life. Or he might lose a toe just navigating a heavy smoker out of a pickup bed while barefooted. The kids spend an unsupervised afternoon breaking a tubful of ceramics. On the surface all is well and cause for celebration, but Bareiša makes it clear enough that little cracks and fissures in both couples’ relationships are without doubt going to be laid bare when tragedy strikes. And without doubt, it will.
If Drowning Dry‘s narrative is, at least to start, relatively straightforward, its approach to storytelling is anything but. Midway through the film—at what feels like its climax, with one of the children in abject peril—the scene skips to another moment in time, months or more into the future, without ever making clear exactly what had occurred and who survived or how. And later, it cycles back to that same earlier scene, repeating it with subtle variation and further exposition. One character does indeed “drown dry,” but in a sense, it’s the narrative that keeps bubbling up with the consequences of the incident: like the water that won’t leave the lungs, the effects of the incident keep resurfacing, refusing to fade away or resolve themselves.
Some of the film’s most affecting scenes, in fact, force the two sisters to recount and re-live the tragedy. In that sense, Drowning Dry becomes less a familial melodrama of wrought emotion than a level-headed, practically detached, exploration of grief and resilience. Bound still by the cabin they own together and their new circumstance as single mothers, Justė and Ernesta must find new ways to cope, to move on, and start anew.
All of the cast are up to the task. As the the two sisters, Glemžaitė and Kaktaitė seem more dissimilar than similar on the surface. Both, though, while making their characters unique, evidence a palpable sisterly love for each other that is the strongest felt force in the film. Their two men, played by Markevičius and Kiela, are in contrast dimwits—not especially malevolent ones, but dimwits nonetheless, drawing on a felt sense of patriarchal superiority, acting largely without thinking, and largely without empathetic or communicative skills. For what they are, they are played well. As an ensemble, the cast shared the Best Performance Award at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, where Bareiša additionally won the Best Director Award.
A percentage of viewers will find Drowning Dry‘s narrative experimentation an unnecessary intrusion. Aside from eliding, for a time, major incidents in the plot only to return to them in the wake of their consequences, Bareiša’s approach is often to let the camera linger, à la Antonioni, on a scene well after its dialogue is complete, and largely to eschew overt resolution in favor of more enigmatic and less obvious conclusions. Some of its imagery—in particular, one long-abandoned meal, or even characters lined up to swim and dive off a dock—is indelible. It’s not hard to imagine the same story making for an entirely different (and probably less impactful) experience in another director’s hands.
Yet Drowning Dry is Laurynas Bareiša’s, and his approach to storytelling makes the film seem unique. It’s a film that makes the most of its metaphor, using the notion of secondary consequence to explore survivors’ trauma in two sisters who must both start their lives anew in the wake of tragedy. At times cruel, at others comic, often troubling and ultimately profound, Drowning Dry digs deep into the frailty of the human condition and the resilience that can ultimately be found in its stead.
Drowning Dry makes its North American Premiere at the Palm Springs International Film Festival
Friday, January 3.
