The Narrative Power of the Sea

Storytellers have been drawn to the ocean for centuries. Whether that be the Greek myth of Aphrodite’s genesis where the goddess of beauty and love is told to be born of sea foam, to a more contemporary example of James Cameron’s Titanic where two lovers are torn apart by the cruel, cold, unfeeling ocean, something about the sea has captivated and terrified humans since the beginning. At the festival, this is exactly one of the thematic threads I recognized across the board: the power, pull, and mystery of the sea.

In one of the most well received Official Competition films at the festival, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the central romance blooms from Marianne and Heloise’s daily walks along the beach. Heloise always insists that one day she’s going to bathe in the ocean and actually does strip down and do so when she realizes it’s supposed to be Marianne’s last day, even though she doesn’t know how to swim. Heloise’s floating in the water, almost naked before Marianne, reflects Heloise’s desire for intimacy that she isn’t fully capable of acting on, just yet. The first time they kiss is even in a small outcropping by the sea with the waves crashing gently in the background. In this context the ocean functions similarly to the example of the Aphrodite myth I mentioned earlier: as a place meant to cultivate beauty and love, while also utilizing the feminine conations of the sea. Representations of the sea in these more benign ways include: in Joan of Arc, which, while being an absolute piece of trash, employed the beach as a place for discussion and birth of action, in Sick, Sick, Sick where the sea becomes a mysterious, magical aid in Silvia’s reanimation spell, or even in Wild Goose Lake where it serves as the source of some pretty exquisite cinematography.

The ocean also played a similar role to the one it did in Titanic: as a force of destruction and despair. In the film Atlantics, the sea is what tears Suleiman and Ada apart: drowning the crew of thirty male workers, including Suleiman. In The Lighthouse, the sea causes Tom and Ephraim to stay boarded up inside the big phallus, basically acting as a catalyst for all the madness, not to mention being the source of all the siren and Poseidon imagery. In Homeward, the ocean functions as a barrier preventing this father and son from reaching the Ukrainian holy land where they want to bury their dead son and brother. In Nina Wu, one of the scenes where reality really begins to blur happens when the actress Nina jumps from a boat and floats underwater for too long, her black hair and dark blood swirling. Then she paddles lost and desperate to the surface and the camera pulls back to reveal that this is actually the ending credits of the film within this film, the ocean serving as a tool to amplify her budding madness.

Overall, I quite enjoyed all of these films use of the ocean (see my mermaid obsession in my Lighthouse review). I also think that the sea offers such incredible aesthetic value to filmmakers where you can place a blowjob in the confined naval world of a lifeboat and suddenly it becomes stunningly beautiful as it does in Wild Goose Lake. In a world where temperatures are rising and garbage islands are growing, it makes sense why the power of nature’s beauty has permeated this year’s cultural consciousness.