Hombre al agua

“Talk to me in a Continental accent.” That’s what Juana (Esmeralda Pimentel), a Mexican corporate heiress, begs of her Cuban immigrant husband Camilo (Gael García Bernal) in a rushed attempt to seduce him. His accent sticks to his lips like honey on a finger — and Juana has had her fill of honey. Their quickie is interrupted by the crying of their baby, shielded only from the marital bed activities by a toldillo and the space between the floor and raised mattress. This sexually frustrated opening scene is the last time in Hombre al agua that the couple attempts to connect intimately. From the Latin American regionalism and estranging place for Cubans within (wealthy) Mexican society and the alienation of Camilo within his own home, to the deromanticization of the film’s married couple at its center, this opening is faithfully indicative of what is to come. 

Camilo met Juana by the design of her father, Abel (Jorge Salinas). Abel, an offensively wealthy Mexican businessman with a bad reputation, fakes his own drowning on a Cuban beach so that a lifeguard, by happenstance, Camilo, can “save” him and then be rewarded with the millionaire’s gratitude in ways that save the latter’s poor reputation. Ripped from medieval times, Camilo is given both a bride and a job running one of his factories in Yucatán. Now he lives in a stone Romanesque country estate as Juana has a mid-life crisis and elicits an entitled Brazilian actress, Fabiana (Débora Nascimento), to make a film about her life, though it isn’t that interesting in the first place, with her situated within the confines of her own home.

As Camilo, García Bernal cannibalizes every actor he performs alongside, to the degree that it becomes distracting how multi-dimensional his performance is while everyone around him gets stuck with one-note telenovela roles (the fault of Bernal, in his capacity as both writer and director). Some of this is by design; the film takes place largely in their estate, like the setting of many telenovelas, and a diegetic show he watches called Liberdade calls attention to the mirroring of structures. It is like the telenovela… Do you get it yet?

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