Marçal Forés refines and sublimates the first installment's recipe, cognizant of the surreal confectionery in his hands.
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| A Través del Mar on Netflix |
He picks up the glove he left behind in the sea. Through my window, Raquel (Clara Galle) and Ares (Julio Pea) maintain a long-distance romance after he moved to Stockholm to study. But missing each other and other distractions force Ares to return to Barcelona in order to keep his love alive. They leave the city together to go to the beach home of the Hidalgo family, who assemble with Raquel's friends on the eve of San Juan night.
Netflix wants to replicate the hit that Through My Window brought to the platform while it is still hot. For this, it has decided to join the same team as the first (with the notable loss of Pilar Castro), led by director Marçal Forés, but to break away from the official line of the books by Ariana Godoy on which it is based, which was giving space to the various Hidalgo brothers in each book. Here's what happened: Ares and Raquel's tumultuous relationship.
Surprisingly, having deviated from the literary content has resulted in the sequel outperforming the original. When it comes to the risqué summer youth romance, Forés already dominates all registers, the characters are more grounded, and the narrative is capable of focusing on what is crucial. It is the ideal product for the teenage imagination that desires to be, with all the absurd but secretly kinky things that someone beyond the age of 17 can be.
Across the Sea is an excellent illustration of what it means to take a great product and finish sublimating it with their own weapons. With Forés, the filmmaker incorporates a fresh pop style at a visual level that already served to soften the disasters of the previous film (which here are viewed through the filter of sun and beach of the Costa Brava), but it is also that the director dares to go a little farther. The one from Animals (2013) experiments with new ways and creates more intricate set pieces and diverse sequences of pure bliss towards the final goal: sensual exaltation and young celebration.
In the end, it is the assurance and freedom that comes with knowing what you are doing and, more importantly, for whom you are doing it. Forés ends up building this amusement park for the dramatic quinceaera that this narrative is, especially striking for those of us who don't paint anything on this San Juan fiesta but will write about it, with that plain and undisguised purpose of addressing the teenage audience. It's appealing even to those of us who are divided between humiliating people and being unable to pull our gaze away from the computer.
This ushers in the era of platform hyper-segmentation, which breathes new life into that cut of adolescent drama picture that has always had a place at the box office and hearts but did not quite know how to recycle itself in the streaming era... It may appear simple because the resources they consume are visible, yet there are items that plainly belong in the same line and formula... but they perform poorly.
This is the instance of Prime Video's clear answer to the Netflix craze, My Fault (2023). When the two films are compared, it's clear that Across the Sea has a degree of audiovisual and narrative competence that its counterpart does not. With the same absurdity and superficialities in the backdrop, neither Eduard Solá nor Forés need to return to clichés and narrative lines from 20 years ago to construct a clear line of what and how they want to tell their story.
The developers understand that, while being true to the characters and tales, they must take things seriously enough that the saga itself confesses that it is all pure fiction. Across the Sea is the narrative of Raquel narrating her life, highlighting the elevated autofiction character that everything recounted in it has the potential to be. My issue is more of a disconnected update of Three meters above the sky. The original, from 2004 in Italy.