Alcarràs review — bruised, bucolic film has notes of bitterness

Children play happily in an abandoned jalopy; dad commands the family farm through chronic back pain and a constant torrent of cursing; underpaid migrant workers toil under the Catalan sun. This is the bruised bucolic picture presented in Alcarràs, Carla Simón’s Berlin Film Festival-winning second feature after 2017’s little wonder Summer 1993.

In that film, the shadow of death hung over two orphaned children; here it is the end of a way of life that threatens a family of peach growers faced with being uprooted from their home along with the trees that provide their livelihood. The fruit appears not as some magical gift but through hard graft. Nature in Alcarràs is both benevolent mother and pitiless, unpredictable mistress.

Other surprises are in store: the verbal agreement that grandfather made with the wealthy landowners, it turns out, was worth not a peseta, even if it was forged amid shared persecution from Franco’s forces. This will be the last harvest and belts will be tightened; even the migrant workers must go. How will the family manage? “We will work harder!” barks pain-stricken paterfamilias Quimet (Jordi Pujol Dolcet) with a wince.

Simón weaves in the social commentary and reflections on Spain’s divided past and present almost imperceptibly; less so observations on the forward march of modernity. Eldest son Roger (Albert Bosch) sows cannabis plants near the peach groves as a side hustle while teenage sister Mariona (Xènia Roset) practises TikTok-friendly dance moves close by — neither scheme bearing fruit. All the while a ticking clock counts down towards the end of the old ways and the arrival of solar panels that will consume the land like sleek metallic locusts.

After the intimacy of Summer 1993, Simón here guides a large multigenerational ensemble with a sure hand, their exquisitely naturalistic performances seeming to appear organically. Meanwhile her script (co-written with Arnau Vilaró) achieves a satisfying sweetness without sugar-coating, finding notes of bitterness in inner family tensions and dealings with a not always co-operative agricultural co-operative. When the last peach is plucked and the diggers arrive, there is a real sense is of what is being lost — not some blissful Eden but a way of life nonetheless.

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from January 6