Mark Reviews Movies: AQUARELA

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 29, 2019

From the film itself, there's no way to tell for certain, because the documentary features minimal speech and no explanatory titles, but the main point of Aquarela seems almost intuitive. On the surface, it's a film that focuses on water in its liquid and solid forms. The threadbare, almost nonexistent narrative begins with the ice sheets and glaciers of Greenland (a fact you'll only learn from the credits), moves across the ocean, and arrives at civilization.

Before making that globetrotting trip, director Victor Kossakovsky provides us with a prologue, set on the vast Lake Baikal in Siberia, in which rescue workers have to salvage various cars that have fallen through the weakening ice. Most of the passengers escape, but there's a harrowing moment when the rescuers spot a man under the ice and scramble to free him. When asked why he was driving on the ice, one driver offers a fairly reasonable answer: This ice usually doesn't start thawing for a few more weeks.

Things have changed, though, as that prologue, showing just how dangerous miscalculating or underestimating nature can be, makes clear. It's not just the earlier thaw on Lake Baikal. It's also the way the ice sheets of Greenland are melting, forming streams that feed directly into the seas and ocean. It's also those glaciers cracking and collapsing with the deafening sound of an explosion, before crashing into the water and bobbing like massive ice cubes.

Watching this happen is awe-inspiring in that traditional meaning of the word—both amazing and inspiring great fear. Kossakovsky spends a significant amount of time in this frozen part of the world, giving us a sense of the cataclysmic change happening right in front of our eyes, as well as a real feeling of the scale of the problem (The camera frames the glaciers with a sailboat in the foreground and takes a long trek underwater to go all the way around an iceberg).

The rest of the trip, observing the tremendous chaos of the ocean before showing cities and towns affected by flooding and hurricanes, puts the consequences of this change on display. Aquarela is unassuming in structure and looks mostly like a technical exercise (It was filmed at 96 frames-per-second and is presented in theaters at half that rate—double what's usual), but there's a vital and frightening message here, too.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products

Buy the Soundtrack (Digital Download)

Buy the Blu-ray