The poet of cloudiness swept the Malaga Festival with ‘The Belly of the Sea’, a hallucinatory chronicle of a royal shipwreck that Géricault immortalized in ‘The Raft of the Medusa’. “Movie theaters are going to disappear”, predicts the Mallorcan filmmaker
The real event was immortalized by the painter Théodore Géricault in
‘The raft of the jellyfish’. In 1816, 147 crew members of the French Navy frigate ‘Alliance’ were abandoned in a precarious raft after the ship ran aground off the coast of Senegal. With hardly any food or water and subjected to the inclemency of the sea, the men were succumbing to confrontation and madness in a horror that lasted for days. Agustí Villaronga (Palma de Mallorca, 1953) adapts the novel ‘Océano mar’, by Alessandro Baricco, in ‘El belly del mar’, a poetic and symbolic film that tells how of those 147 shipwrecked only nine survived, including a medical officer implacable (Roger Casamajor) and a rebellious common sailor (Oscar Kapoya).
The film, which hits theaters on November 12, swept the Malaga Film Festival with six awards, including those for best film, screenplay and director. It is also the only Spanish film selected for the European Film Awards nominations. Villaronga attends EL CORREO by phone given his delicate state of health: he was detected cancer this summer and is undergoing treatment. Filmed with a very low budget and in absolute freedom, ‘The Belly of the Sea’ comes just after ‘Nacido rey’, a 20 million euro blockbuster about King Faisal that the Mallorcan director filmed in grandiose settings in the Arabian desert.
-The idea of ’The Belly of the Sea’ arises during confinement.
-I see the sea every day from my house in Mallorca. During the confinement I was encouraged to write, but the story did not exactly start in those days. It had been many years since he had read Alessandro Baricco’s text and adapted it for the theater. The story was left in a drawer and during the confinement I was encouraged to turn it into a film.
-The theatrical weight is evident in the film.
-Totally. When going to the cinema I tried not to hide neither the literary weight, with that voice-over, nor the theatrical heritage, which is especially noticeable in the staging. The whole story is supposed to take place at sea. There are times when the raft is in the water, but at others it shows that it is not. It is a story relived through a trial, and that theatrical convention allowed me to make the film. Otherwise, we should have done like in ‘Titanic’ or ‘Moby Dick’, and we had no budget for it.
-Not it occurred to them to roll in the sea.
-No. We filmed two days at sea with half a raft surrounded by a team to be able to control the currents, the wind … It is very complicated.
-What caught you in Baricco’s text?
-He is telling you something very dramatic with a poetic halo. There were 147 dead on the La Medusa raft, the agony of a shipwreck with people dying without food or drink, at the mercy of storms. Terrible. But Baricco transcends all that and creates something spiritual, like nature itself, with the sea taking over everything. It makes you think how little we people are in the face of nature. It talks about the confrontation between humans for survival. It still impresses me.
-Do you surf?
-No, I’ve never had a boat. But I know the sea, I used to go fishing as a child with my godfather and I had many friends with boats and sailboats. But I’m not a scuba diver or a sailor, huh? I am not like the king.
A scene from ‘The Belly of the Sea’.
-Fear turns us into animals, into a drifting raft, into a war and a pandemic.
-In those circumstances, the best and worst of people come out. A raft is a kind of ring, a very small space in which the fewer people there are, the more chances of survival you have. That happens in many other circumstances.
-It is inevitable to link ‘The Belly of the Sea’ with current migratory catastrophes.
-That’s how it is. He is talking about something that happens daily on the shores of the Mediterranean, thousands of deaths every year. There is a moment in the film in which images are provided by Francesco Zizola, who worked with Open Arms to remember that present. The film begins as if it were from the period, but there is a moment when you don’t really know what period you are in because of the costumes. I didn’t want to leave it as something that happened two hundred years ago, it just keeps happening. Politically it is something very complicated, I don’t think that with a movie it helps much. Baricco goes beyond the pure ‘Weekly Report’ and talks about human conflict.
-Your previous film, ‘Born King’, is the antithesis of this one.
-Life is so. I thought a lot about doing ‘Born a King’, and I don’t regret it because I learned a lot of things. Chance makes the next thing a film that does not reach half a million euros. It is very little money. We did it in three weeks with a very small team. You earn very little, in fact, you screw up. But you work with enormous creative freedom. I have all the control over the film, I don’t have to go through platforms or televisions. Nobody thinks because as it is so little … It is like having a pen in your hand, creativity is direct. What you feel and what you write is there. I would repeat right now.
Agustí Villaronga among the actors Roger Casamajor and Oscar Kapoya.
-Your cinema has always been associated with cruelty, with a certain dark look. Has that look changed?
-I think so. Time has brought about a change. In almost all my films there is a fascination for evil, sometimes I can. But now it’s not that way anymore. I keep looking towards evil, it is a place that interests me, but it no longer fascinates me. There is no morbidity or anything sick. It is a past that is part of human life, because man is surrounded by evil. Looking at it helps people.
-The cinemas where we have always seen your films are having a hard time.
-It is very sad. I believe that movie theaters are going to disappear. You have to adapt, the platforms already existed before the pandemic, but in the last year and a half they have taken up a lot of space in theaters. Let’s see what happens. Also when the DVD appeared it seemed that we were all dying and things continued. The need to tell stories in images is not going to be lost, but the way to do it will. The sad thing is not that the rooms disappear, but that the platforms just want to make a lot of money. Let it happen as with televisions like Telecinco, in which the way of leading the person to the information is not let’s say … positive. It is very different how we saw cinema before and how we do it now. People abandon the series to the second chapter, advance the films and see them in pieces … In that I am nostalgic.
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